The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Christmas is coming up fast and before you know it, December 25th will be here, along with all the good things it brings. From the excitement of your little ones to fantastic festive food, there is so much that is great about Christmas Day.

However, there is also a fair old dollop of not so great things that come with Christmas Day, especially if you’re a bit of a Grinch. Even if you try to block them out with positivity, you can’t deny that not everything about the run-up to December 25th and the day itself is perfect.

Here are some of the good, bad and plain ugly things about Christmas that you may not want to admit to:

No matter how far away your family lives or how few times you see them throughout the year, you tend to forget all of this when you band together to celebrate over the festive period. There’s nothing better than a loud and lively lounge that’s packed to bursting with loved ones on Christmas Day. It almost makes it worth fighting over the last roast potato at lunch.

Your whole family really means your whole family, including your in-law’s, cousin’s’ unruly kids and that auntie who seems to live for squeezing your cheeks. There will be migraines, people stealing your chair and too few hiding places throughout the day. You may even get a few arguments – which is where the ugly part of Christmas comes in! It’s only one day, though, so just look forward to when everyone goes home and deal with it.

Christmas is definitely the season for trying to squeeze in every extra mince pie you can and washing them down with far too much Baileys or sherry. You get to eat all your favourite things and make the most of that age old excuse: ‘it’s Christmas’. On top of that, you can be sure that at least one neighbour gives you a tub of Quality Street or a tin of biscuits, and we all know it would be rude not to eat them.

We all know that the Christmas outfit we took time and care picking out isn’t going to fit by the time New Year comes around. Between the mince pies, mulled wine, turkey sandwiches and chocolate coins, the pounds soon get piled on, even before December 25th. While you could try and stick to a healthy diet, we all know that isn’t going to happen so just deal with it and make the standard ‘New Year, new me’ resolution on January 1st.

You can tell people you love Christmas because you get to give people presents all you like, we know that everyone loves opening a gift or two and that you’d be disappointed if there was nothing under the tree with your name on it. There’s nothing better than finding that your other half or your parents have listened to you and got you the thing that you really really wanted.

Yes, getting presents can be a bad thing too. After all, there’s only so many generic body wash or fragrance spray sets you can be happy about. Let’s not forget having to try and hide the look on your face that clearly says ‘what the hell is this?’ so as not hurt people’s feelings. Then you have to work out what you’re going to do with all the things you’re never going to open, let alone use.

Christmas isn’t Christmas without some fairy lights and a bit of tinsel. No matter what your style, it’s hard to feel fully festive until you’ve got your decorations up. Yes, you may have to fight to keep the cat off the tree and you might have bought one too many tealight holders shaped like Santa, but that’s all part of the fun.

Knotted fairy lights, malting tinsel, trees with one of the feet missing and the ominous jingle of broken glass in a mystery box. What’s not to love about decorating your home for Christmas? No matter how prepared you are, you never seem to quite finish putting everything up. In fact, just as you finally finish getting everything where you want it – or simply give up in a haze of Baileys and regret – it’s time to take everything down and you then need to spend months trying to get your home back to normal.

No matter how you feel about Christmas, you can’t deny that it comes with a dose of both good and bad things – let’s just hope there’s a lot more good! But then it wouldn’t be Christmas and we wouldn’t love it as much as we do if it wasn’t at least a little bit unpredictable.