`You'll want all day to-morrow, I suppose?'

`A poor excuse for picking a man's pocket every twenty-fifth of December!'

The fortnight of 'festive' indolence is under way. I recall, when I was a child getting on for sixty years ago, that grown ups would work all the way up to and including Xmas Eve have one or two days off and go back to work until New Year's Day which for some reason found the grown ups sore of head and full of remorse... Then one year, in the 70s, the holiday was at a weekend so it was thought right, fitting and proper to take the Monday off as well, to make up for not having had a day off ... and so the nonsense grew until Xmas Day met and married New Year's Day and gave birth to a tawdry litter of fourteen days of pap and pabulum. Nowadays many just jack it all in and have a two week end-of-year break up (like they were school children again) ...  it's an imposed commercialized pseudo-pagan (well the Xians nicked it from the pagans to begin with) drink fueled marking of the passing seasons in a bland debt-ridden, double-glazed, air-conditioned world where seasons have absolutely no meaning any more.
I blame the Victorians, they invented the modern Xmas with their idiotic Xmas trees (let's put lit candles on a tree and keep it indoors near an open coal fire, seems like a good idea!) and cards with impossible snowy scenes (it rarely snows in this country, truth be told, and, in any case, snow is just the absolute pits!) and the roast bird and the presents and the family get together (and the inevitable fall out ...  If only "one's own kin and kith were more fun to be with...", so true Mr Nash, so true...) A particular villain in all this indulgent, seasonal frippery is, of course, Charles (Gawd bless us, every one!) Dickens with his nauseating sentimental tripe, I hope his chestnuts are roasting on an open fire, eternally ...   Bah!