Christmas

Annual rant.

WTF are they doing putting Chrismas cards and wrapping paper in the shops now! It's the end of August you bunch of wazzocks, Christmas is months away. Do I want to see the same banal selection of Christmas cards for the next 5 months, No! No, I damn well don't! Nor do I want it thrust down my throat everywhere I look. Are we such a sad bunch of f*$ks that we have to start looking forward to the next festival 5 months before it arrives? Is there nothing else in peoples lives but the next celebration. And after Christmas, it's Easter again!

Get a grip! If people want to buy Chrsitmas cards and such then a month or so is ample time. If they are the sort of people that are that well organised they will have brought next years cards and paper in the previous year's sales at a quarter of the price. Want to know a secret? I don't think I would recognise that it was last year's card design. Want to know something else ... I wouldn't care if it was. Nor would I care if I'd received one previously. Somehow the thought behind it seems more important.

Oh yes, the sales ... they used to start after Christmas, but now strangely start before. That would be because some bright spark noticed that people would put off buying stuff at full price when they could buy the exact same item for significantly less if they were prepared to wait an extra 3 days! I have a radical new idea. Why not charge what the item is worth? No 'sale' required. Just provide the goods at a fair price, not hiked up to exploit a fad, but just a reasonable price. Another idea ... design stuff that doesn't have a fashion shelf life of 15 minutes. The worst examples of this are in womens' clothing where by the time you've bought the goods they are out of date. A new line is being hung on the rails as you depart. But, aside from womens clothing there are plenty of other examples of short term fadism, take a look around.

With one breath we are being preached at to conserve energy, and with the next exhorted to buy new X, buy, new Y, because A and B are now so passé. No wonder we have a confused angry generation growing up, the messages they are getting are so mixed you could put it in the oven and bake them as a cake. Of course you' d have to take it out early so it would be only half baked.

A friend of mine used to recycle his Christmas cards. He'd sign and date them and return them the following year. Some cards lasted five or six years this way. Seems like a good idea to me.