There’s completely ridiculous and then there’s this.

Just a quick note to let you know that if you’re really, really sad you can start your Christmas shopping on August 2nd in Selfridges. That’s right, the store that sounds like it should specialise in home appliances will start dishing out toilet roll tubes wrapped in some fancy paper which, if you’re lucky on a good day and with the wind blowing in the right direction, might make a small banging sound before ejecting a pointless gift and a crap joke, a whole 145 days before we celebrate the birth of Christ. What’s more, they’ll probably charge at least ten times too much for the privilege of being able to wear a thin bit of tissue paper whilst reading the material Roy Chubby Brown didn’t want aloud to the rest of your family and friends. Shameless cashing in really has gone too far this time.

As if that wasn’t enough, the store are proud to announce that customers can paint their own baubles this year. Well that’s brilliant, but in my experience the average man on the street tends to be pretty pants at design and I don’t want my Christmas tree adorned with decorations which wouldn’t look out of place at the lower end of a primary school art class. Besides, if I wanted to paint my own baubles what’s to stop me painting them at home? I should imagine most of us have got a job lot of art sets we’ve been given for Christmas and then dumped in a small corner of the room we happen to visit least often. “Oh thanks Gran, that’ll be really useful for when I want to stick two fingers up at a four-months-premature shopping promotion on Oxford Street”. Pah.

Oh, and another thing. Who’s going to spend £500 on a life-sized donkey? If you can afford to waste that sort of cash on glorified teddy bear you’ve probably already got a stables on your 70-acre estate anyway and so you might as well buy a real one.

To top it all off Geraldine James, Selfridges Christmas Shop’s buying manager, said at the announcement of this abhorrence that “Christmas is coming earlier each year”. Erm, I don’t think it is. At a mere eighteen years of age my experience of a 2,000 year old celebration is nominal at best but I know enough to be able to confidently state that Christmas happens on the 25th December every year. Unless there’s been a significant drop in atmospheric pressure during 2010 which somehow then dictates that we start unwrapping presents a couple of weeks earlier, it’s my understanding that Christmas will jolly well stay where it is thank you very much and anyone who decides to buy a tree in August is stupid because it’ll be dead by mid-October.

So thank you, Geraldine James, but you can keep your first name for a surname because I’m not going to do any of my Christmas shopping in your shop. Besides, we bought all our baubles and fairy lights and Christmas cards in the January sales. It’s cheaper that way.

Photo courtesy of Filomena Scalise

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