One for the Road: What goes up…

Going from December to January is like emerging from a wild, decadent house party at about half nine in the morning: You don’t really feel fit to face reality yet, but you know that if you hang around much longer you’re probably going to die.

The festive season is great craic, but it isn’t sustainable.

I, for one, feel no more than a few lumps of cold meat away from becoming the first person ever to develop scurvy and gout at exactly the same time.

The saddest thing about this prospect is that it is not an altogether unappealing one.

Given the toll that all the eating, drinking and seasonal generosity has taken on my bank account, the thought of being diagnosed with a medically unprecedented co-moribidty that people might potentially pay money to study actually sounds like a nice wee earner.

So why do we do it to ourselves? Why, year-after-year, do we indulge in a way that leaves half the country driving to their nearest beach, stripping to their drawers and running headlong into wintry waters?

Surely something has gone wrong with our Christmas culture when 50 per-cent of the population feel the only way to cure the festive comedown is to re-baptise themselves at the earliest opportunity?

Well, I think it is because Christmas, more than being a religious celebration, secular holiday or capitalist plot, is a delusional state of mind – a collective madness that causes people to do crazy, self-destructive things.

The incipient insanity starts in early December, but the wheels really start to come off around Christmas Eve Eve, when our perception of time becomes warped.

Most people are off work. Everyone is sitting up and lying in. Strangers start asking each other what day it is. Festive fatigue begins to fuzzy things, until suddenly it’s unclear whether time has been suspended, vanished or ever existed at all.

Soon, other fundamental laws of the universe begin to break down too.

For instance, Newton’s Third Law, which simply states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, is always one of the first to collapse.

By Christmas Eve, action and consequences are divorced.

Drink no longer means hangovers and food has lost its relationship to sustenance, appetite, pain and longevity.

Such suspensions, inversions and deviations in the natural order continue to arise, accumulate and coalesce until they eventually crescendo in full-blown Christmas Morning madness.

As the physical world pulls crackers, throws back wine and eats until bursting point, our shared psyche rocks back-and-forth in a padded cell faraway.

The feeling of being lost in a neverending moment of a million blissful moments peaks and plateaus on Christmas Day – but the summit extends outwards like a benevolent branch and carries us into Boxing Day.

More revelry. More life without consequence. More instant sensual gratification. More food, drink and devilment.

It is only when we awake with banging headaches the following morning that we begin to question the materiality of the magical realm in which, by our actions, we professed a belief the previous night.

Scrambling for the paracetemol, we realise that The Great Christmas Present – a state of being where petty constructs like past, future, limits and excess seemed not to pertain – was only a twisted figment of our imagination.

We fell for it yet again.

Still, though, while this is the beginning of the downward curve, the fall is made bearable with more beer, food and languorous living.

Most of us manage to keep the party going until after New Year’s Eve and even into New Year’s Day.

Then, at some point between January 2 and January 6, as sure as a shaft of lurid mid-morning light breaches the blinds and tells the house-partyers that the show is almost over, the invasive voice of reason insinuates itself our minds and whispers those four terrible words… “This can’t last forever.”

We squirm, grimace and hang our heads in a shame that is only known by the sane.

Christmas is over – it’s time to stumble forth into January’s sobering light.