There. I said it. 

Don’t get me wrong, Christmas day is the best day of the year. 

Give me any excuse to shove ham and turkey and potatoes and lamb and greens and potatoes into my face hole and I will take it, but the months leading up to that day are torture. 

Sure, people become charitable around Christmas, and are nicer, but aside from the food, the niceness, the spirit of giving, the chance to have the family around a table, having time off work and the Boxing day test, what has Christmas ever done for us? 

Absolutely nothing. 

People don’t see it, but I’m about to open your eyes to how Big Christmas is relentlessly crushing our collective souls.

First up we need to talk about decorations. 

In a former life, I was a professional Christmas decorator – I’d work seven days a week, 10 hours a day from late October until mid-December before rolling out of bed on New Year’s day to tear them all down, sort them and throw them into boxes until next year. 

I’ve put up three times as many Christmas trees than most people would put up in their lifetimes.

Christmas decorations have ruined my life. I’m 22 years old. 

I know a thing or two about Christmas decorations, and the most pertinent thing to know is: you’re terrible at it. 

Yes, you. 

Everyone is terrible at Christmas decorations because Christmas decorations are inherently garish and hideous. 

Have you ever noticed that every set of coloured lights are the same four colours, and those four colours look disgusting when placed next to each other?

Add that to the inability of people to correctly sync the timing (or even the flash settings – who puts lights on different settings?! You monsters) and lights become as deadly as bug zappers. 

When I close my eyes at night I still see Christmas lights, flashing out of sync. 

Christmas trees are awful and scratch your arms and are terrible for the environment and no-one ever puts enough effort into them to make them not look like a child vomited tinsel in its general direction.

And can we talk about tinsel?

Also known as the The Hayfever Caterpillar? 

These fat, cheap, tacky worms collect dust 11 months of the year, and after you’re done sneezing for 10 minutes after taking them out of the box, you put them on the tree praying the flashy, shiny decorations distract people from everything wrong with your life. 

Instead of a friend walking in the door and asking how you are and why your marriage is falling apart, while they simultaneously, desperately try to steer conversation from their credit card debt, you can both ignore reality by spending 15 minutes talking about some shiny, stupid rope you threw at a tree two Sundays ago. 

Secondly – oh yes, secondly, we’re just getting started. You underestimate how many repressed emotions I have on this topic – Christmas carols. 

There are no good Christmas carols. 

They do not exist. 

Not even Michael Buble’s Christmas albums, which profit off our misery in the same way Big Oil profits off destroying the planet. 

The only one I thought I’d ever like was ‘Silent Night’, but it turns out Silent Night still involves people making weird, screeching noises with their mouths.

It’s bad enough having your mum put the carols on every Christmas Eve and then turning it up so you can’t even distract yourselves by complaining about how Pete Handsomb got dropped from the Boxing day test, let alone having neighbours who put carols on mid-November. 

It’s enough to make you want to bring back capital punishment. 

Thirdly, we need to talk about the abomination that is Christmas movies.

There is one Christmas movie, and that movie is Die Hard. 

Not Love Actually, not Elf, not Gremlins, and absolutely not National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, which is a terrible movie but you’re all too blinded by Chevy Chase to see it.

Home Alone gets a pass because the bulk of the movie is about how Kevin McCallister is living the dream of missing Christmas and setting people on fire instead. 

Every cheap gag in every Christmas movie has already been said by your lame uncle or boring aunt, who then proceeds to explain why it’s funny and then makes the joke another four times in the next 10 minutes. 

I’ve read jokes from bonbons that are funnier than most Christmas movies. 

I could go on – I have a list and I’ve checked it twice a day, every day, for the past five years which has 239 points on it, but my editor has informed me I need to stop swearing in the office and the only way to do that is by going back to repressing my emotions into a cold, burning anger.

So, Merry Christmas, you filthy animals. And a Happy New Year.