7 Reasons

Tag: christmas day

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

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

    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.

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

    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.

  • 7 Reasons to Love Christmas Day

    7 Reasons to Love Christmas Day

    1. Children. Christmas isn’t really for grown-ups, it’s about children. For them, the anticipation is incredible and, when the day itself comes, it’s all new and exciting. When the children burst into our bedroom at 6 o’clock this morning and jumped up and down on the bed screaming “It’s Christmas, it’s Christmas!” we were very moved. We don’t know whose children they were, or how they got into our house, but we were moved.

    2. Drink. Christmas Day starts with Bucks Fizz and the rest of the day proceeds in an alcoholic-haze. A large proportion of Christmas Day is spent consuming many disparate beverages, but no one gets seriously drunk. They just experience the day in a relaxed alcohol-induced-fug, which is probably just as well, as they’re locked in a house with their in-laws.

    3. Presents. I think it’s great that I now have more Argyle-patterned-socks than it would take to outfit a golf-playing millipede. I’m a big fan of the cow-print tie too. Really.

    4. Food. Never mind turkey and sprouts and things, it’s the sheer quantity of snack food that makes Christmas Day great. A staggering array of tins and bowls of things are left in the living room for you to gorge yourself on all day. Best of all are the enormous tubs of Twiglets that are available. Like sticks covered in Marmite, they are THE savoury snack. I always try to eat them all before anyone discovers that I’ve opened them, or hide them once they’ve found out that I have. Christmas is about sharing, Twiglets are not.

    5. Speech. Traditional, regal, and, best of all, punctual, The Queen’s Christmas Message is delivered at 3pm every Christmas Day, you can set your watch by her. Or, as most people in the UK eat their Christmas dinner at 3pm, your oven timer. The fanfare which precedes the message is like the nation’s dinner gong, precipitating a hurried exit from living rooms across the land. If it weren’t for repeats and highlights on the news, she could say whatever she liked. She could even say whatever Prince Philip liked, nobody would ever know.

    6. Crackers. Shop-bought crackers are rubbish. Home-made crackers are amazing. If you make your own then you don’t have to put up with poor jokes, shoddy hats and worthless plastic toys. You can put whatever you like into them – you can even have themed crackers. A couple of years ago I made pirate crackers and we all got eye-patches, bandanas, miniature bottles of rum and pirate-themed jokes. There’s not much that’s more fun than turning your family into pirates and eating Christmas dinner with them. Home made crackers are avast improvement over shop-bought ones.

    7. Television. Christmas television is great. There are recent films, one-off dramas, special editions of popular series and Morecambe and Wise Christmas shows. There are classic films too, including that perennial disappointment, The Great Escape. As a child I misheard the title and thought I was going to watch The Greatest Cape. I had imagined that it was a film about a sumptuous and colourful cape, perhaps with magical powers. The premise of my imagined film is still less preposterous than Steve McQueen jumping the fence on a motorbike. Christmas television is great, The Great Escape is not. It should be called The Disappointing Escape.

    Merry Christmas to all of our readers.