Apologies Full of Christmas Cheer

What Ho Proles!

Close friends have advised me to issue an apology for my manners of last night. I regret the whole alcohol-fuelled incident and I can only assure you that my liver suffered irreparable damage yesterday on account of the high quality Scottish whisky I expected that most ungrateful of organs to handle. Little did I expect it to scramble my logic after midnight and turn my tone strident; a bit like the cat that got caught under the back wheels of the Bentley last New Years Eve.

But I’ll be damned if I’m going to take it all back! You now see the power of the blog when left in hands unable to cope with the responsibility? This is why we need order, rule, responsibility…

But there I go again.

The guts ache like the furnaces of hell and my ire has already been roused once today, only instead of the state British blogging, it had more to do with yuletide logging.
An appointment at my offices in London kept me away from the Hall for much of the morning but when I returned, every juice of my puritan ancestry flooded my brain at the sight of decorations decking the Hall. I had forgotten that it was the first day of the month when housekeepers lose all sense of reality.

‘Don’t you like it?’ asked Mrs. Priggs, carrying one end of a pine tree that must have once been the pride of a Norwegian fiord. I waited as sixteen feet of trunk, branch, and needle went by before the other end arrived also carried, inexplicably, by Mrs. Priggs.

‘Didn’t I tell you I’d rather deck the Halls with of barrels of explosives?’ I cried to her before I lunged for the nearest piece of tinsel and ran screaming from the house.

I locked myself in the gardener’s shed where I reattached myself to sanity with a quick sip from my hip flask. It gave me time to consider why, in this unchristian age, we still find Christmas so appealing.

On the face of it, red nosed fellows with obesity issues are a matter for television self-help shows and shouldn’t be encouraged to clamber up on rooftops unless it’s for comic effect. In this heightened age of liability, Santa’s more likely to come a cropper, if not by way of the forty foot fall, than in the courts where they’ll strip him of every asset, reindeers included, list him a sex fiend with a fetish for kissing mothers under gaudy plastic trees, and consign him to some program involving care in the community.

Christmas is the most unhappy time of year, when all the usual routines are thrown to the wind in favour of the new world order. Marriages dissolve, addictions form, friendships end, and the world is invaded by poor taste novelty goods and socks you’d be ashamed to wear in public.
It is any wonder that fat old Santa is the Coca Cola Company’s finest creation when children across the globe are being taught that this is the season to demand, demand, demand. Instilled with expectations that the parents cannot hope to match, these little terrorists rule the month.

As I’m sure Perry Como sings somewhere or other: it’s the gut gnawing time of the year.

At the very least, it’s enough to make a man throw a bottle of spirits over the tree and hope the lot catch light. I tired of the charade last year and spent the New Year damning the EU for demanding that all Christmas decorations have to be fire proof. I now insist that Mrs. Priggs buys only the cheapest Chinese tinsel and baubles, which I can be sure will burn quickly and completely without the chance of their setting anything else on alight. Unless you’ve ever lit a streamer made from flash paper, you’ve not celebrated a Mugatroid Christmas.

I finally emerged from the shed when the darkness was beginning to fall. I don’t know how many hours I’d been in there, but a thin layer of snow lay on the ground and the Hall looked temptingly warm. I went inside and discovered that all the preparations were finished. The hall looked festive and the parlour, with the nineteen foot tree, looked every part of a child’s Christmas dream.

Mrs Priggs was hanging the last of the two thousand baubles on the lower branches.

‘Tomorrow morning,’ I told her, ‘I want you to buy thirty one miniatures and hang every one of them from that tree. If I’m going to get through this devilish month in one piece, I’ll have to be professional about this and take my newly found appreciation for alcohol to a new festive level.’

She looked at me with one enormous smile full of evil menace and even viler intentions.

‘Then I’ll be sure to be the first to wish you a Merry Christmas,’ she said. ‘Merry Christmas, Mr. Murgatroid.’