Going Home For Christmas!

Christmas Day is over in the blink of an eye, everyone’s is pretty similar and everyone’s is pretty nice really (I understand there are the poor and the elderly, but what are the chances of those unsightly demographics reading this website?). My uncle is down with finding cracker jokes funny and falling asleep after lunch like everyone else’s, cute huh?

That’s the kind of chocolate box listicle content you’d expect from a weaker, lazier and less forward thinking website than this one, but over here at Platform we’d rather talk about the broader picture, and Christmas isn’t just that 18 hour period of wearing smarter jeans than normal and getting cool shit for free, it’s about a week out of your social calendar put aside for hanging out in the place you lived when you thought backpack hip-hop and liquid drum and bass were really cool.

Leaving your vibrant nightlife and jaded but liberal friends in the big city to return to the suburbs/villages/commuter towns from whence you came starts to feel more and more like a novelty the less you do it. Eventually you start to feel disconnected from and alienated by the place you grew up in, you’ll feel like it’s too small and backward for you. After a few years you may as well be visiting your parents on the Wicker Man island, with navel skin strewn all over the place and an eerie feeling that you’re deeply unwelcome.

But, unless your parents hate you, then however you feel about Nothinginterestingseverhappenedheresville or wherever it is you’re from, they’ll expect you back there for a bit of time at Christmas. And if you don’t go because you’ve got a serious girlfriend whose family lives in the city, then you’re breaking your poor mother’s heart, you ungrateful little shit, that woman got stitches in her taint for you.

Head back home for Christmas and enjoy yourself with your old team, they’re going to be there too, some of them never even left! Some of them are literally 27 years old, still living with their parents and playing metal guitar all night! Arrested development is an actual thing!

Here’s a few things to look out for while you’re home:

Friends’ younger sisters being hot

Remember how you got older and grew into yourself? It was an awkward process, you wore bad clothes for a really long time and you used to put all that shit in your hair, it was awful. Now you’re in your mid twenties you’ve finally resolved all your skin issues, you’re done with ‘phases’, secure in yourself and pretty much going to be like this til you die. That stuff happens a lot earlier with girls though, and at 19 they are already flirting with guys a lot older than you to get into clubs in their university town, they’ve probably been bought gifts by forty year olds and they’ve maybe even had a hot lesbian experience.

And you last time you saw Chris’s sister she was a thirteen year old tattle tail who got you in shit for smoking cigarettes in her dad’s basement. Now she has better coke contacts than you, she’s going to catch her death in that dress and her bra is all lacey and shit. This pub visit has taken a turn for the better right?

But you’re going to have to suck it up Humbert Humbert, there’s no way she’s going to let you touch her, she adored you til she was 15, and all you did was act like you were five years older than her and leave home. Now she looks upon you with great affection as a figure from her childhood. Only a certain type of girl is into that sexually (hint: not the marriage material kind).

Behaving like a teenager

Regression is as easy as taking the N64 out of the attic and calling your sister a cunt for taking the last Pop Tart, There’s a strong chance the one of following  two things is going to happen while you’re home for Christmas:

You will have an almost fistfight with your sister about the kind of issue that is resolved in moments by people who didn’t come out of the same vagina. Maybe that fight will be to do with the TV, the washing up, whether or not your sister puts it about when she’s in the city or even who dad loves more. No one can possibly tell at this stage.

You mother will beg and beg you to get out of bed because she hasn’t really seen you since last Christmas. You will refuse and get quite acutely angry when she persists in her request (SERIOUSLY MUM. FUCK. OFF.). It’s going to take you more effort to stay in bed than get out of bed, which is how it was when you were 17.

The more things change, the more they remain a permanently adolescent moody cunt when they hang out with their immediate family.

Remembering how fucking weird church is

You realize that some people still believe in god? Not in a ‘there’s got to be something’, mushrooms/vague kind of a way, but in a ‘Jesus definitely was the actual son of real life totally real god and being gay is for faggots’ kind of way. You’ll forget about this fact all year, but if you’re going to church on Christmas day to sing carols, you’re going to be faced with old people who are scared of death, weirdo Christian couples in lots of fleece who get their kids to read to the congregation, the knowledge that dead people have been in the room recently and even a real life priest. Then people will pray, very sincerely, out loud. Do they have any idea how weird and creepy that looks?

If you feel yourself getting nervous around the Love of Him, it’s worth getting hold of one of the children’s ‘order of service’ books, those horrible laminated things are full of discoloured, anemic 25 year old illustrations of kids playing and Jesus watching. That’ll quickly remind you that all of Christian belief is propped up by hopelessly lonely, out of touch, childless spinsters in their 50s who just want something to do. Then you’ll realize that it’s less of an lunatic religious cult, and more of a way for cat ladies to talk to a sexually non threatening man and occasionally be allowed to read to other people’s children. If you really want to bring down Christianity, you’ve just got to get all these women boyfriends.

Doing the dirty with ex girlfriends from school

Getting drunk in your home town around Christmas is fun because it’s Blast-from-the-past Central during the festive season, and even though that means you’re going to bump into your old French teacher and maybe act childishly surly around him and embarrass both of you, you’re also going to end up near someone you might have put your lil’ winky in as long as ten years ago.

Sure, these days you’re into different things, she’s not as pretty as she used to be, she likes top 40 music and she’s wearing flares, but she’s been one of your beat off staples for nearly a decade (those fucking tits are still amazing!!!!!!!) and you’d be doing yourself an injustice if you didn’t at least make out feverishly for three hours. It’s not about unfinished business, it’s about rehashing the past and being way dirtier and bolder than you were at 17. The colours of those early, formative crushes don’t run, you’re both going to be a festive option for one another until one of you gets married, and possibly after that.

Doing drugs with people who never left town

Earlier we talked about the folks who never leave their hometowns. There’s a certain type of guy who stayed in Notmuchgoingonshire because they weren’t really into forward thinking and were really into comfort zones, so could only see as far as ‘if I live at home I won’t have to pay rent and I can work at Blockbusters forever, free movies!!!!’.

These guys are usually pretty smart but have a blind spot when it comes to living like an adult, and as such have the best possible soft drug hook-ups one could hope for in a rural town. For instance, super strong hash you can inhale off a hot knife in a pub carpark on Christmas eve as you talk about the time you hotboxed someone’s mum’s Volvo and she found a bong on the back seat and thought it was a vase. Or maybe one of your home town bros has a whole massive crate of laughing gas canisters (whippets to you Americans) that you can work your way through on boxing day evening at your rich friend’s house while you watch Takeshi’s Castle on a 42 inch screen. Or maybe one guy brought a wrap of MDMA to the pub one afternoon and you’re drinking and doing dabs of it as Fairytale of New York plays on the stereo while it’s still light outside. Painting those kind of pictures with my words is a joy.

All this stuff = part of you wishing you’d never left/part of you being really glad you did.

Happy Holidays! XXX