Oh bloody hell, it's started again! The dreadful office tree is up, the shopping centres are bedecked with plastic holly and large gold objects of a shape which has no formal geometric name but looks uncomfortably like a butt-plug, greetings carefully constructed to avoid religious references abound and I have been press-ganged into the office party and Secret Santa (so named because no-one knows how to spell or pronounce Christkindl - it always comes out sounding like some kind of chip).
Christmas. If I had a residual sense of universal justice I would ask "What have I done to deserve this?" but, as I am now soundly convinced of the inherent randomness of the universe, I am putting the whole thing down to a meme that has mutated and gone cancerous.
The early signs of the disease started back in September with the emergence, in a hidden corner of the supermarket, of cards and gifts for one's loved ones overseas. A visit to the GP at that point would have been wise as he could have spotted the growth for what it was and excised it with a painless little procedure in his offices and sent it away for testing to detect any signs of malignant festivity.
Hindsight is a fine thing but, we are forced to admit, we ignored these early eruptions of fake snow and ploughed on regardless, distracted as we were by the quotidian concerns of work, family and fun.
Then, in mid November, the red started to spread from it's little corner and slowly pervaded more and more shelf space. H G Wells' Martian red weed has nothing on the Santa / holly / blood-like tones that crept like a threatening crimson shadow down the supermarket aisles, engulfing unwary products in its path.
At this point, had we been wise, a strong dose of radiation or some chemotherapy might have knocked the beard off the Santa and left him exposed for what he is; a strange, obsessive, fictional stalker with a long record of break and enter and a judgemental personality. But, again, we missed our opportunity.
For experts managing pandemics, the great fear is that the contagion will become airborne and its spread will be uncontainable. And that is exactly what happened in the last week of November. Infected by contact with badly drawn nativity scenes on cards or packets of discount mince pies, store staff made the fatal mistake of switching on the Christmas music. Medical authorities cried into their beers from sheer despair as George Michael, John Lennon, Bing Crosby and other opportunistic disease vectors spread the infection far and wide.
And now it's too late. Christmas has leaped from person to person. Increasingly serious cases are turning up at emergency departments every day having grown red hats, antlers and desperately jolly flashing earrings in consequence of having caught the disease. Mental health experts are overwhelmed by the number of adults regressing to childhood, pretending to be elves, sitting on the knee of the office creep who volunteered - yet again - to dress up the red suit this year and walking around ringing tiny little tinkly bells.
Houses and public buildings have become cesspools, spreading the illness to innocent passers-by through garish flashing lights, inflatable characters doing unlikely things on the roof and fake snow melting off the windows in the 35 degree heat and running in rivulets across the footpath.
There is now nothing for it; we are beyond cure. The whole country is going to be put into palliative care until the New Year after which, it is to be hoped, we will have found some kind of vaccine.
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