33 Things I Would Change About Christmas

For Alchera:

1. The heat
2. The flies
3. Over consumption of food
4. Over consumption of alcohol
5. Office christmas parties
6. Christmas pudding
7. Poor quality Christmas ham (I want it to taste smoky, damn it!)
8. Glace Fruit gift boxes that nobody ever eats
9. Real Christmas trees (they make me sneeze)
10. Cheap decorations
11. Any kind of decoration that sings or plays Christmas carols
12. Santas dangling precariously from people’s roofs
13. Neighbours having Griswald competitions
14. Dogs wearing reindeer antlers
15. Shop assistants draped in tinsel
16. Sort-of creepy Santas that enjoy close contact with young children
17. Sort-of creepy Santas that try and pick up women
18. Sexy female Santa’s elves in skimpy costumes
19. Jokes about Santa only coming once a year
20. Mrs S. Claus as she doesn’t have a name or identity of her own.
21. Endless Christmas programs on TV to amuse the kids
22. That the people who create these Christmas programs usually have no idea what the ‘littlies’ really like, and thereby bore them to tears with saccharine Christmas commercialism and sentiment.
23. Station Christmas promos
24. Sydney and Melbourne trying to out do each other with their televised Carols by Candlelight
25. The tired old stars and moth-eaten children’s characters they drag out to perform in Carols by Candlelight
26. Being dragged out of bed on Christmas morning to open presents
27. My mother insisting on taking photos the minute someone’s sleep fuddled, dressing gown clad form emerges from the bedroom.
28. Familial arguments about who gets to where the Santa hat and distribute the presents this year
29. My mother wanting to photo-document the opening of each and every little present
30. Getting useless gadgets for Christmas (No Mum, I am not referring to any thing you have ever bought me)
31. Christmas presents that are ‘passed on’ to other people
32. Crass commercialism
33. Greed

One Word

I like this one. One Word asks you to write about your reactions to one word for 60 seconds. Today’s word is candle:

Candle in the wind. burning nylon dolls dress. random thoughts flickering. people bickering. flame. matches.

Idea from Farid