Guest Post: 7 Reasons Christmas Eve Is Better Than Christmas Day

Posted on December 24, 2011 in Guest Posts | 1 comment

If you were in the 7 Reasons club this time last year, no doubt you’ll be rushing down to the butchers today to celebrate The Day Of The Sausage. The rest of you, no doubt, will be eagerly awaiting tomorrow. Christmas Day. Arguably the best day of the year. Well, certainly in the top 365 anyway. Here at 7 Reasons we are not adverse to handing out gifts and this year you get yours a day early. It’s a special Christmas post from the undisputed King of Guest Posts, Richard O’Hagan. PS: When he’s not writing rude words in the snow he’s adding to his Memory Blog. Well worth a RSS Feed Subscription.

1.  Anticipation. One of the best things about Christmas Eve is that it isn’t Christmas Day. Obviously. This means that it is the day when you reach the height of anticipation about the day to come. You can’t do anything more. The shops are shut and Amazon haven’t been able to piece together a next day delivery service for December 25th*, so you just have to kick back, relax and resign yourself to the fact that you can’t do anything to make Christmas any better, so you just have to look forward to the day to come. And you also get to build large toys whilst drunk. No-one who has ever tried to put together a tricycle at five to midnight ever forgets that experience, no matter how much Baileys they’ve downed beforehand (and no matter how hard they try to)

2.  Food Choice. It’s only Christmas Eve, so you can eat what you damn well like. The mandatory turkey-fest is another day away and all dining options remain open to you. Which means that if you fancy getting a huge takeaway so that you can have the leftovers for breakfast on Christmas morning, you can do. Or you could have sausages.

3.  TV. For all of the build up that the television companies give to the 25th, Christmas Eve television is infinitely better than Christmas Day’s offering. Aside from anything else, it tends not to be clogged up with octogenarians reading you their Christmas letter and Channel 4 trying far too hard to be trendy, not to mention the tired old sitcoms that weren’t that funny anyway being even less funny as they try to shoehorn a festive storyline into their archaic format.

4.  Shopping. The shops being closed on Christmas Day isn’t a bad thing in general, but at least on Christmas Eve you can pop to Sainsbury’s if you run out of milk or, heaven forbid, booze.

5.  Work. Admittedly this doesn’t apply to so many people this year, but over seventy percent of the time Christmas Eve is a work day. It is a great day to go to work for most, because almost nothing gets done, you get to go home early and someone pays you for working the full day. And if you do have to work properly, you get to feel all virtuous and Christmassy anyway because you are the only people working properly, so it is a win-win whichever way you look at it.

6.  Lie-Ins. Whether you are working or not, you can be sure of one thing – you will get to sleep in longer on Christmas Eve than you will on Christmas Day. If you have small children, they will be up and wanting to open presents practically as soon as the clock passes midnight. If you have older children, you’re probably going to be woken up by your grandchildren instead. If you have no children, your partner will get over-excited and still wake you up early. And if you live alone, don’t worry, there will be a child wailing somewhere long before 7am to rouse you from your slumber. Get all the sleep you can on the 24th, because the 25th is going to hurt. Which is why you should make sure that you don’t run out of booze on the 24th.

7.  Disappointment. Inevitably, Christmas Day cannot live up to all of the expectations. We build it up to be the perfect day of all days, so something has to go wrong – the turkey taking too long to cook, the neighbours calling in unexpectedly, Santa not bringing you the moon on a stick that you asked for. Christmas Day cannot help but be a disappointment. Christmas Eve never is, because at the end of it a fat bloke is going to give you a load of presents. And nothing is better than free presents, is it?

*In truth, they’ve not really worked out a delivery service for most of December, preferring the ‘give it to Yodel or City Link and hope the customer forgets ever ordering it’ option. One the things I ordered is presumably still in a locked empty flat where Yodel apparently delivered it a fortnight ago.