Now that Christmas, New Year and Valentine’s Day are over, I can complain about them without feeling like a grump. I don’t know about yours, but my Christmas was pretty boring. I got up around midday and said hello to my mum and dad. We ate some food and I sat staring into the fire wondering where it had all gone wrong. This wasn’t much different from every other day of my life since I hit puberty, but it was doubly disappointing because, like a lot of people, I put some stock in Christmas Day, hoping that when it comes around I’ll somehow have a much better time than during the rest of the year.
This hope has never been grounded in experience. Christmas has always been at least a bit disappointing. I’ve tended to think that this is just because nowadays we don’t do Christmases like we used to do them, but this year I started wondered if we’ve ever done them like we used to. I’m not sure I’m alone in this; since getting back to university, when I’ve asked people how their Christmas was, most of them have just looked at the floor and gone, “It was OK, just kind of quiet.”
It’s the same with any “special occasion”. At each birthday, reunion, party, or whatever, I start off sure I’m going to have the time of my life, and that the world will finally take its pants off in front of me. I mean proverbially, as in the proverb, “When it’s party-time the world finally takes its pants off in front of you.” The way it turns out, though, all these days usually just end up the same as most other days, the only difference being the increase in the number of people shouting beery things into my ear like, “You I know you you’re my pal you’re my pal I know you.” I end up just spending times like this with a kind of disappointment, which either gets expressed outwardly as irritation or stews guiltily inside.
The problem with special occasions is this word “special”. Consciously setting a time aside for having a unique, fulfilling experience – a day when you’ll get up as soon as the alarm goes off, have more to say for yourself, be more fun, have less indigestion and dry skin, remember more people’s names, and generally be more “with it” than on other days – this sounds fine, but it doesn’t always work. Specialness doesn’t come from predictable situations; it isn’t plannable. It springs on you, and this springing makes it even more valuable. The brain is picky when it comes to deciding what it will consider special or not. Sometimes you just need to look at something boring like a fork or a tree from a certain angle, or just by chance hear a random song playing in the next room; at other times it demands you go on holiday somewhere or buy a new watch, but even these aren’t guarantees.
The point is that you can bring all the right ingredients together but that doesn’t mean they’ll mix the way you want them to. It’s like that thing Stephen Fry said on QI about how all the same elements that go into making a human body also go into ordinary stuff like chalk; and in my experience, most of the time, bringing all the right people into the right place makes a boring thing like chalk rather than a human being. So you can invite that crazy friend to your party and play that song you like and eat those square cheesey crisps, but more often than not it’s still just going to be a bunch of you looking at each other and moving your mouths around to see what noises fall out.
