Christ in a cracker

When you get to a cer­tain age (in my case, mine), Christ­mas stops being a string of child­hood mem­o­ries re­plete with the ex­cite­ment of guess­ing what’s in the pre­sents under the tree that’s ap­peared in the liv­ing room (or even, if you’re re­ally young, with the ex­pec­ta­tion of see­ing Santa Claus’s sleigh mak­ing a night-time bee­line for your home); and once you’ve got through ado­les­cence, Christ­mas stops being the stun­ning spec­ta­cle of your ap­par­ently grown-up par­ents and rel­a­tives scream­ing blue mur­der at each other over pol­i­tics after a few glasses of what­ever; and once you’ve moved to Cat­alo­nia, it stops being the marathon of Christ­mas lunch fol­lowed by a Saint Stephen’s Day lunch fol­lowed by a crowded New Year Party fol­lowed by Kings’ Day and yet an­other huge lunch. No, when you get to the afore­men­tioned cer­tain age, Christ­mas has be­come a count­down that kicks off as soon as the usual trap­pings – such as tiny Fa­ther Christ­mases cling­ing, bur­glar-like, to bal­cony rail­ings and hillocks of nougat bars aka tor­rons in the su­per­mar­kets – have popped up from one twi­light-en­croached day to the next. A count­down, be­cause you can­not help but won­der, as you hang the usual baubles on the minia­ture plas­tic tree which you’ve both­ered to set up be­cause it’s so easy to take down, how many more Christ­mases have you got left? A hand­ful? A baker’s dozen? As many as twenty if you cut down on the cava?

On top of which, this year, de­spite Pfizer’s rooftop shouts about a Covid vac­cine, Santa would need scores upon scores of elfin task forces to get the stuff into our veins be­fore the Son of God’s pu­ta­tive birth­day.

And even though there’s pre­cious lit­tle Yule­tide cheer going around - given that our pan­demic-ori­en­tated fears are still with us and that we can’t even visit the town next door and that we’re barred from the bars – not a few singers who are not short of a few bob have de­cided to cash in any­way on our di­min­ished Christ­mas spirit by bring­ing out yet an­other an­nual clutch of sugar-dusted sea­sonal al­bums: the usu­ally fairly catchy Meghan Trainor has, to her shame, re­leased ’A Very Trainor Christ­mas’, fea­tur­ing the clas­sic ’Have Your­self A Merry Lit­tle Christ­mas’; the an­o­dyne Car­rie Un­der­wood has out-an­o­dyned her­self with ’My Gift’, fea­tur­ing the clas­sic ’Have Your­self A Merry Lit­tle Christ­mas’; and Dolly Par­ton has of­fered us, wait for it, ’A Holly Dolly Christ­mas’, fea­tur­ing, yes.

And on top of all that, as we will never tire of re­peat­ing no mat­ter how much you may tire of read­ing it, in Cat­alo­nia we still have nine po­lit­i­cal pris­on­ers who are serv­ing sen­tences of be­tween seven and thir­teen years handed down by the Supreme Court for or­gan­is­ing a ref­er­en­dum (the self-same court re­cently gave a con­victed child abuser 24 months); and there are still seven Cata­lans in exile, in­clud­ing cab­i­net mem­bers and a pres­i­dent, de­spite the fact that their par­ties, in coali­tion, won the last elec­tions, three years ago (in Bo­livia, the ex­iled pres­i­dent was al­lowed to re­turn home pre­cisely be­cause his party had won that coun­try’s elec­tions, just last month).

Merry lit­tle Christ­mas.