Christmas Conundrum

Giles Catchpole wonders how he should celebrate the season

- Giles Catchpole

IT IS ALWAYS difficult, at this time of the year, to think of a new and exciting way to address the whole concept of Christmas. The central purpose of traditions might reasonably be said to be their unchanging regularity. Christmas comes but once a year but it will be on the same day and be celebrated in the same way as last Christmas and the Christmas before that and the one before that stretching back as far as the memory can reach.

Not like Easter, then, which bounces about the calendar like a golf ball in a squash court before settling somewhere about the middle of April.

So Christmas represents a singular issue because it is always exactly the same and that makes describing it in new and exciting ways something of a challenge for the jobbing scrivener.

If I don’t talk about fish and fishing even on or about this most sacred of days then the Wing Commander will be reaching for his Biro as soon as he’s finished word-searching the inside back page.