SEEING as the festive season is just around the corner, I am being force d into considering Christmas shopping.
You’d think I would enjoy such a thing, given my usual penchant for spending.
However, I am also inherently selfish and am not so at ease with spending my hard-earning pennies on others.
It suits me much better to just buy gifts for myself. However, admitting to such a thing does not toe the party line, so to speak.
Apparently, Christmas is about giving – and Jesus, it is also about Jesus, lest we forget. So yes, I have to buy gifts for other people, against my will, of course.
This leaves me with a problem and as far as I’m concerned, no one deserves presents because, as usual, all of my family have behaved abominably t his year.
Sister, for example, went and got pregnant.
Now, she has gone baby-bananas and is wrecking all of our heads.
If I get one more email from her asking “did you see anything nice for the baby?”, I’m afraid I’ll be forced to kill her.
This is usually followed by an email filled wit h links to baby websites, with accompanying text which reads: “Look at these baby uggs! ... look at this little fleece ... look at this travel system ... look at this Tens machine”.
She has gotten so out-of-control that she is now calling me at odd hours, ordering me to go online so that we can both per use baby clothing websites at the same time.
This involves her cooing at clothing while making suggestive remarks like “t hat would be really nice for t he baby, don’t you think?”
What she really means to say is “Buy that for t he baby or else I’ll kill you stone dead with one of my crazy pregnant lady stares.”
She t hen tries to placate me by saying “you and mum are the only people I can ask to buy me stuff – I can’t tell anyone else what to get or they’ll think I’m a bitch”.
Sometimes I try to bite my tongue, before saying: “I sincerely doubt that will be the first time people will have thought you to be a bitch, sister”… and sometimes I don’t.
To be fair, I am quite happy to go along with t he baby schmozzel for as long as necessary, if only to secure my role as godmother.
Mother, on the other hand, is currently embroiled in a battle of wills with sister.
She is steadfastly refusing to purchase anything even remotely resembling baby items until baby is born.
Apparently, this is an old Irish tradition but it is driving sister close to the edge.
They were forced into having an airy fairy conversation about positive thinking one day when both of them were alone.
I am told passages from The Secret were quoted. I’m very much glad I was not there.
This leads me to brother, who is not getting a present because he has gone mushy on our asses.
He is in love with his Dutch girlfriend, you see, and is a changed man. He even helped cook dinner last weekend and says things like “I miss her” in public. This has caused father much concern because he feels like he has lost his only son. Sister, bizarrely, is also incredibly bothered by t his for no reason at all but I am putting it down to her being psychotic.
Anyhow, that is why he is not getting a present.
Mother is not getting a present because she has started quoting politics and is using these current straitened times to issue stark warnings about spending money at ever y possible opportunity.
And papa is not getting a present because … hmmm, actually, he has been surprisingly well-behaved of late – he didn’t even mind it when I dragged him to t he barber’s to get his hair cut because he was starting to resemble Steven Seagal in Under Siege.