... Journal Entry
It's that time again; Christmas! In October! The retailers delight and the consumers nightmare. Mind you we photographers quite like it for the opportunity to snap the seasonal illuminations with a bit of dark light technique to the fore.
For the poor retail staff it's jingle bells and Santa's sleigh ad nauseam from now until the 24th of December with large doses of Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales thrown in for good measure. All false jollity and bonhomie in the name of sales and maybe even profit?
For the poor punters it's weeks and weeks of buy stuff, buy stuff and ratcheting up the Xmas stress and spending money you shouldn't on stuff that people that mostly won't appreciate, many of whom you don't actually like. Christmas comes but once a year and when it comes it brings nothing but overeating, hangovers, family feuding and unpleasant credit card bills.
For most retailers it's the time of the year they've bet the company on. When they hope to make their big profits and make up for their poor trading and losses of earlier in the year. "Everything will be all right if we have a good Christmas"! No pressure!
For the rest of us? Well apart from the pretty lights, I'm with the unreformed Ebeneezer Scrooge, "Christmas, bah humbug" and "Every idiot who goes about with a 'Merry Christmas' on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart". Good old Charles Dickens, thought this is exactly not the sentiment he intended us to take away with us when he wrote his novel of course. For me, it's all become mega excessively commercialised to have any real meaning anymore.