An A-Z of Christmas Humbug: C is for Christmas Concert

Today I have a dead ass. A bum so numb I might as well have a) scooped out a load of silicon gel from one of my baby daughter’s sodden nappies, blended it up with porridge, and PVA glue, and hairy chunks of Lego from under the sofa, and injected the whole bloody lot of it straight into my ass cleft, or b) tattoo’d a detailed Technicolor picture of a Stage 4 Bedsore on each of my ass cheeks with a spectacularly dirty needle and then waited for Life to mimic Art.

That’s how fucked-up my bottom is.

It’s all the fault of the school Christmas concert. Of course.

I should have known something was up as soon as I saw one of the other mummies carrying a pair of PINK MATCHING CUSHIONS into the school hall a whole half an hour before the concert goddammit. But I was already misty-eyed at the thought of my little ones, singing their hearts out, solemnly saying their one line, looking for their mummy and their daddy in the audience, and I didn’t register.

In fact, I didn’t really register until I was queuing right up alongside the school hall windows and saw hundreds of TINY CHAIRS arranged in neat rows inside the hall. My first thought was that the tiny chairs might be props. Perhaps we were about to see something different - not the usual nativity play - but a more subversive production, like, oh, I don’t know, a blackly comic play entitled something like Goldilocks Goes Fuckin Ape-Shit*. That kind of thing. Or, perhaps we were expecting a coach-load of Oompa-Loompas, or munchkins, or hobbits.

Of course, I doubt I would have brought a pair of pink matching cushions to the school Christmas concert even if I had known about the size and hardness of the chairs. For a start, I don’t like looking like a total TIT. And I like looking like a TWONK even less. (Even though I almost always do). Secondly, I only own one pair of matching cushions, and one of the pair features a picture of a giant, with a willy, drawn by one of my children in indelible permanent marker. And I don’t want to be sitting on a giant’s willy in my children’s Christmas concert.  (Giant willy, maybe; giant’s willy, no.) To be honest though, I doubt I would have brought a pair of matching pink cushions to the school Christmas concert even if I had to sit on a 6ft cactus, or on one of those medieval Judas chairs, or an electric chair, or a spike, or a friggin Bumbo, or if they were the only things between myself, and a nail bomber. OK, I’ve crossed the line now. I know I have. I’m very sorry.

But this is how I feel about matching pink cushions.

I enjoyed the concert, of course I did. I had to swallow down hard as my little boy, in his ‘carol singer’ costume, sang a word-perfect rendition of a Christmas carol, and dutifully wore his multi-coloured scarf and gloves set, in spite of the centrally-heated school hall. I did the same when my beautiful daughter, in her wings and sparkly pink tights, danced with the other fairies, and said her line, and kept her cool, in spite of the fact that she was bricking it.  

And if my ass dies, as it will, it will have been worth it.

* If anybody wants to commission me to write ‘Goldilocks goes Fuckin Ape-Shit’, I’m available. ‘Goldilocks Goes Fuckin Mental’ would work just as well as a title. The play would of course be a critique of society’s fetishistic attachment to possessions and property, and of our inability to share, a position represented by The Three Bears…

P.S: If you are the person who took the pink cushions to the school production, I’m only jealous. 

P.P.S: This is probably the last in my A-Z of Christmas Humbug installments. From now on, this series of blogs will be retrospectively known as An ABC of Christmas Humbug. I'm bloody knackered okay.