I am now mostly impervious to Christmas.
I used to hate it with a passion. When I was teaching in a junior school, and was the only pianist, from early November onwards I would be separated from my class, who were split up and sent off around the school with work, so that I could accompany whatever production we were inflicting on the parents in the last week of term.
Initially, these practices would be one afternoon a week. As the fateful day progressed and it became less avoidably obvious that the kids didn't know the words, couldn't sing the tunes and had so far been treating the whole thing as a gigantic bunk, so the teachers in charge began to panic and we devoted more and more time to this anti-educational activity. This, of course, was what the kids wanted: more authorised bunking, although usually by the day of the performance they were up to a reasonable standard. The teachers concerned with the production had been mostly treated with sullen acceptance by those who weren't. As the second half of the Autumn term progressed, this was gradually replaced by petty hostility and by the week of the production most of us were "daggers drawn". I'd turn up at home exhausted from my term's efforts for a scant fortnight's holiday during which we would organise Christmas-on-the-cheap for our kids, being unable to afford the lavish presents that their school friends were accustomed to: after all, I was a rarity - a man in teaching whose wife worked at bringing up the kids. Most of my colleagues were married women in the job for "pin money" while their besuited husbands went off and did something in the city for inordinate amounts of cash. I would regard the looming start of the spring term with an unholy dread, being completely aware of the gulf in the kids' standards that had been created by our societal devotion to keeping up the appearances that somehow we are a Christian nation and that Christmas actually matters.
