Somehow another year of my pathetically short life has already passed and I find myself once again staring down the barrel of the gun that is Christmas. For the past few years I have suspected that Christmas is now held every six months as it definitely used to take a lot longer to get from one frantic, falsely festive holiday to the next.
I used to love Christmas. But that was when I was a child, and as we all know children are stupid. Babies don't know a damn thing and small children are only slightly more informed, which is why I decided to come and teach.
No matter how dreadful my lesson, no matter how little information I provide these little runts with, they will leave knowing a lot more than they did when the little idiots walked in at the beginning.
I have a small amount of good will and it has to stretch across a whole year (or possibly six months if my suspicions are correct) during which I am bombarded with cretinous behaviour, and forced to smile at people who I would like to set on fire.
I'm not a festive man. I feel for Scrooge and share his passion for delicious humbugs; Christmas would be more fun for me too if I could have my own Tiny Tim Cratchit to sneer at.
So it is with some joy that I have spent the build up to this saccharin sweet time of year in Korea, a nation with very little Christmas spirit and absolutely no Christmas music piping out of every shop and haunting my dreams with its vile tweeness.
Sure I'll miss my family, but they're not going anywhere and at least I haven't had to help decorate a tree. Trees belong outside, where trees live. Why kill one, hang shiny crap on it and prop it up in your front room, where it distracts you from watching the television properly? We could start killing other things that belong outside and dressing them up as a yule time jape.
What's that? Oh that's just a squirrel I ran over and put some sparkly trousers on, he looks good on the mantelpiece doesn't he?
In fact I would not even have known it was Christmas if it weren't for one of my youngest students presenting me with a handmade Christmas card yesterday. In fairness to her, it is pretty impressive and far better than I could have managed with my miserable lack of any artistic ability whatsoever. In fact if you were to look at any picture I have ever drawn, you would question whether the artist even had opposable thumbs.
Inside the card began "Dear. Hello! Teacher I'm Alison nice to meet you."
I know who you are Alison, I've been teaching you for 6 hours a week for the past month, but it appears that either you don't know my name or you are just calling me "Dear" which is a little patronising given that you are 8 years old and barely over 3 foot tall.
At the end it said "Bye Bye" and then "From Alison" but in brackets, almost as an afterthought that the teacher might be such an imbecile (an understandable concern in fairness) that he hadn't realised it was from Alison.
Still I like the card and because she started writing the word "Christmas" too close to the edge, she had to stop at "Christ" and then write "Mas" underneath which gives it a deeper, more religious tone that as an atheist gives me a perverse pleasure.
Afterall, Christmas has become far too commercialised of late and I like to see that the small Christmas spirit that is here is taking it back to basics. It was heartwarming to hear North Korea threaten the South with a "Holy War" yesterday. I read it, sighed and gave a wistful smile. Holy. That's more like it. Back home I would be reading about price wars. Not here where Christmas is given it's true meaning, no we can look forward to a Holy War.
No expense spared mind, apparently nuclear weapons are on the cards too and I said before I came here that I wanted new experiences. A nuclear war is definitely a new experience for me, as I have never even been bombed, let alone by a nuclear bomb. Obviously the downside to this experience would be that I will die. That said so will my boss, so ever cloud has a silver lining and all that.
But in seriousness, it would be typical of my luck if during my first Christmas without nauseating music, office parties of part time drinkers annoying me and all the other irritants of western life, I ended up having it all ruined by being blown up in a war.
Apparently the South Koreans made a small reconciliatory gesture after the monumental war maneuvers, by erecting a giant Christmas Tree on the border of North Korea.
Great, just what we needed. Now if only I had a direct line to Kim Jong Il, I could gleefully tune into CNN to see a baffled reporter announce that in breaking news, the North Koreas had just set up a huge dead squirrel in sparkling trousers on their side of the divide.
Oh yeah, for what it's worth Merry Christmas.
Dear Monkey Boy
ReplyDeleteOh you cynic! Not liking Christmas! I can just imagine the distraught look on your relative's faces at all the presents they have bought you that clearly would have better been given to someone else.
Also I think N. Korea promised a Holly War. They were threatening to throw bunches of the stuff across the divide until S. Koreans decided they had been pricked enough and gave in or decided to fight back. The worst you could then expect from that little episode might be some Poison Ivy battles. It could become a national Sport with titles to be won.
You see how seemlessly we returned to the subject of an Ivy League?