Whimsical Christmas Musings

My proposition this Christmas is very simply that everyone gets it wrong.

 The Russians, Serbs, Greeks and other Orthodox peoples get it wrong because they cling to the Julian calendar and only get round to marking Christmas when the rest of the world has already moved on to January 7.

 The Americans get it wrong because they insist on holding their grand celebration on Thanksgiving Day in late November, with the result that Christmas for them is inevitably an anti-climax.

 The Swedes and Spanish get it wrong because they dilute their Christmas festivities with subsidiary jollifications such as St Lucy’s Day on December 13 (Sweden) and Three Kings Day on January 6 (Spain), and thus they too lose the impact which Christmas ought to have.

 The French, Germans and other Continental Europeans do at least focus firmly on Christmas itself.  But they too get it wrong because they hold their principal celebration on Christmas Eve, so that for them too Christmas Day comes as an anti-climax.

 Only the British in fact concentrate on Christmas Day single-mindedly as their one powerful focus of celebration.

 But the British also get it wrong!

 The British get it wrong because for some unaccountable reason they insist on consuming their grand Christmas feast at lunchtime.  The result is that they spend the rest of the day in a stupor, nursing their indigestion and incipient hangovers and bickering with their relations.  The sensible arrangement would be to restrict the lunchtime meal to a light if delicious appetiser and celebrate the grand feast and climax of the whole Christmas season on the evening of December 25, which would surely be found both more pleasant and more appropriate.

 With which reflection,

 Merry Christmas!