How Was Your Christmas?

"Oh, you know. Had a few kings and shepherds round, gave birth to the Son of God. Quiet, really."


Content though I am with my very unmerry non-Christmas, the tedium of one festive tradition was beginning to get to me but I have found a way of brightening it up - by becoming a pathological liar in the face of seasonal small talk.

By way of explanation (that's two sentences I've inverted now! Dammit, dammit, dammit!!), let me admit that I have ranted before in this tiny corner of cyberspace about my hatred of "small talk" but, more than at any other time of year, t'is the season for this folly. People can't even be bothered with the old standbys during the festive ferago. You don't seem to hear:
"How are you?" (As if you fucking care and anyway you'd be really fucked if I actually fucking told you!)
"The weather doesn't seem to know what it wants to do." (That would be because it is, in fact, a collection of meteorological parameters and not a sentient being, asswipe! Now piss off out of my bus queue!)
"Will this rain ever stop?" (No, no, no, of course it won't. We'll all be washed away in the cataclysmic flood which is to follow and die horrible, agonising deaths. Still, mustn't grumble, eh?)
"Have you come far?" (Well, considering that five million years ago we were all monocellular lifeforms in the primordial soup, I think we've all done rather well!)

No, all inventiveness goes out of the window at Christmas and there is just one line of small talk for everyone and one stock response:

"Did you have a good Christmas?"
"Not bad - quiet, you know."

You could be forgiven for thinking that the whole sodding planet had turned into the reference section of some galactic library, the amount of "quiet" Christmases that were being had!
I have had enough of these exchanges. I cans't take n'more! The trouble with small talk is that it lacks any kind of imagination. It is a series of stock questions which demand stock answers. That's hardly putting to good use the 10 per cent of the brain we actually have available for cognitive reasoning.
I am keen to get the most possible out of my tithe and so I have taken to dreaming up altogether more interesting and thought provoking replies:

Git: "Did you have a good Christmas?"
Pither: " I'm afraid not. My budgerigar had to have a leg amputated and, what with my infection and the wife doing a five stretch in Holloway, I haven't really seen anyone."

Git 2: "Did you have a good Christmas?"
Pither: "Yes, really good, thanks. We went to Mia Farrow's for our lunch on Christmas Day, as usual, but then on Boxing Day we had the St Winifred's School Choir and John Denver round to our place for nibbles and a game of Twister."

Git 3: "Did you have a good Christmas?"
Pither: "Well, as you know, I'm a senior ranking officer in the Royal Protection Squad so I had to spend the day at Sandringham but the wife and I managed to jet off to Nice on Boxing Day to hook up with Hugh Grant and Arthur Mullard."

Git 4: "Did you have a good Christmas?"
Pither: "It was all a bit hectic, I'm afraid. Our polar bear had a knee infection, my granny contracted typhoid and we had to have our youngest, Nigel, taken into care because he was crayoning on the furniture."

The possibilities are endless. Also, these "pants-on-fire" responses tend to kill the conversation stone dead, unlike the ubiquitous "quiet" response which positively invites the drone you are collared by to come back with something equally banal. Hurrah!

"Quiet" Christmases can go to Grantham.