I've come to realise as an adult just why it is that Christmas comes only once a year; because it's a mission and a half to put up freakin Christmas trees!
I did ours the other night and I haven't been that ball deep in foliage sweating like a rapist since ‘Nam. Which I've had a few flashbacks to recently but then I always do this time of the year what with the high humidity, the hot nights and lots of Asian students about, all of whom I strongly suspect of having a hand grenade or AK47 concealed on their persons.
Why just the other day DougalMac and I were enjoying each others metro sexual company down at the lagoon and I was reminded of a similar idyllic setting we had encountered in Da Nang in '68. We'd come across a water hole amongst the hills and had taken to bathing. There we all stood, soaping each others backs all the while hoping that whoever held our single bar of soap didn't drop it, when out of the reeds snaked an advanced patrol of VC.
Quite why they didn't open up on us there and then has always been a mystery to us but we'd like to believe it was because that even they, with their narrow little eyes and communistic ideals, were moved by the poignancy of several hardened men taking the time to gently soap each other in a brief reprise from the madness of war.
Either that or they were awestruck by the length and girth of Lancey's M60 – and I don’t mean the one he'd left on the bank besides the pool.
Yep, someone was watching over us that day. Perhaps it was 'ol HeyZuez himself. He's the reason we have a Christmas after all, not that we should joke about it like Tui did last week with yet another of their billboards. Despite the harmless humour of it all - and it was one of the funnier Tui efforts in quite some time - somebody complained about it. That somebody was a Christian, proving yet again that a small religious minority in this country can't handle the jandal, quite possibly because they know that we know that their religion is a sham.
Not that complaining about Christmas is restricted to Jesus and his home boys, some folk have decided they don't like the giant Santa that has stood in central Auckland for the last 50 years because he has a long crooked index finger, which makes him look ‘seedy’. Now let’s get one thing straight, if he was bumming Rudolph whilst a topless Mrs Claus watches on then it could be claimed he was ‘seedy’, but a crooked finger...
Don’t you sometimes wish Christmas could be like it was when you were a kid with no responsibilities? My grandparents lived in an old Victorian house with ceilings as high as a P addict and every year Granddad would get in a real tree that only just fitted in the room. That sucker - the tree, not Granddad - would soon be covered in decorations, candy canes and so many lights that half the town had to sit in darkness whenever we switched them on. It seems over the top now - says the guy who just struggled to erect a 5 foot plastic tree from China - but that is what people did back in the day.
They didn’t do shopping malls packed to the brim though. Apparently Christmas shopping means only one thing at this time of the year; hard out five fingered discount time as professional shop lifters hit the shops en masse. Who knew there was such a thing aye? I mean we were good back in my College days but we would never have called ourselves ‘professionals’ but we would've practiced more if we knew we could make a career out of it!
I remember once spending almost an hour in Toy World once waiting to pinch as many G.I.Joes as my mate Brent’s bomber jacket would hold. I made like I was buying them for my little brother and even went to go so far as to joke with the owner that ‘they all look the same to me haha’. The fuck they did. I was hard core and I knew what I wanted and the moment the guy went out the back to check something I had more plastic down my pants than a lezzo with a strap on.
It almost went pear shaped though. No sooner had I got out the door than those Joes not tucked into my pants fell out the arse of Brent’s jacket and onto the pavement. Luckily the stores window display shielded me from view and I was able to kick them out of sight of the shop before picking them up and legging it all the way down the main street. I must’ve made quite the sight; a pubescent boy in an over sized jacket running down the street with G.I.Joes in hand and a small erection.
Now that’s seedy.
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