Why wait? Let the goodwill commence immediately!

Hey chaps and not-chaps!
Hello, that is to say. I greet you, and shake you warmly by the cyber-hand.
I bet you're thinking 'why all the bonhomie, homie?', except you probably don't say 'homie' because my blog tends not to attract 'gangstas' and the like. Probably more along the lines of 'I wonder why Mr Wivell is acting so genial?'

Anyway, I digress, with a rapidity and blind disregard for audience that few can successfully pull off. The reason for my jolly joviality is because Christmas is here at last. Yes it is. It is, I tell you.
I live in Lincoln. This, rather appropriately, is the setting for the Lincoln Christmas Market, and it started tonight. So I have spent the evening in a great big Christmassy wonderland. That's why Christmas has arrived.

I don't like the attitude people adopt towards Christmas, even during the market. We get really hyped up about it in, like, August, and spend the whole ruddy time anticipating the 'big day', which inevitably fails to live up to the pant-wetting excitement the nation spends waiting for it. Our problem is that we narrow Christmas down to the one day. Sure, we shop 'til we're literally blue in the face (it's winter, after all) and put up the decorations, but deep down, but we don't really adopt that Christmassy mindset, that loving, jolly mindset of goodwill and appreciation. For some reason, we save our goodwill up, for that one day; that one, poor Christmas Day that has so much to live up to. And it never does - we're British, after all. The very nature of a British Christmas is sprinkled very lightly with melancholy, the generally ignored but constantly nagging knowledge that it's nearly over, that the clock on the mantelpiece above the roaring fire is ticking away, and we will soon have to go back to whatever dreary, tinsel-less activities we do for the rest of the year.

What we need to do, what I am going to do, is consider the entire month of December as Christmas. The twenty-fifth is still the big day, Christmas Day, the climax of it all, but that shouldn't limit the lovely Christmas spirit to there and then. I said 'Merry Christmas' to a random stranger during the market, and he looked at me as if I had wiped my nose on his scarf. He gave me that look that seemed to express the message: 'What the hell are you talking about - it's the third of December, you dipstick.' Well, sir, I say you are the dipstick. The dippiest stick in the... stick box, because the third of December is Christmas. As is the first, the second, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, the seventh, the eighth, the ninth, the tenth, the eleventh, the twelfth, the thirteenth, the fourteenth, the fifteenth, the sixteenth, the seventeenth, the eighteenth, the nineteenth, the twentieth, the twenty-first, the twenty-second, the twenty-third, the twenty-fourth, the twenty-sixth, the twenty-seventh, the twenty-eighth, the twenty-ninth, the thirtieth, the thirty-first and the good old twenty-fifth of this twelfth month of this year Two Thousand and Nine.

Merry Christmas, one and all. Have a wonderful month.