Tis the Season...

Party season has begun. I look forward to the elongated Christmas celebrations in Ireland with a mixture of anticipation and horror. On one hand, it's all great fun: mulled wine and Christmas decorations, and a bit of banter and general good-will. There's a real 'kids on Christmas Eve' vibe to everything. People are a bit giddy and well up for anything and there's always some event to look forward to.

On the other hand, it's absolute drunken-ness on the streets of Dublin, playing dodge the puke during your Sunday Christmas shopping "adventures", pants that have suddenly become two sizes too small and best of all: waking up in the middle of the night with a mouth that tastes like an ashtray, a pounding headache and the vague feeling that you've said or done something wholly innappropriate which can then be replayed in yer head through the wee hours of the morning until it becomes an elephant sized disaster and you think that perhaps it would be best to pack yer bags and jump on the next plane to a new life. (but maybe that's just me. ;) )

In the States in general and New England in particular, we have two things that moderate all of this good fun/complete excess: Thanksgiving and Puritans. Without Thanksgiving to mediate, Ireland moves from fairly muted Halloween fesitivities into two months of full-on, hard-core Christmas debauchery on Nov. 1st. The Christmas decorations go up, Marks and Spencer start showing dessert porn on TV (super-close up shots of sticky-toffee pudding, dripping with creme anglais and some husky voiced female in the background: "Not just Sticky-toffee-pudding, M&S Stiiiiccccckkkkyyyy-toffffeeeee-puddddding"), and best/worst of all, the partys begin. In addition to the easing into the Christmas season that Thanksgiving provides, we New Englanders have a history of Puritanical self-denial. Sure we try to fight it, we're cosmopolitan, modern folk after all... ;) but there's a little man in a pilgrim hat somewhere inside of us that says, "perhaps you shouldn't have that fifth pink cocktail with a strawberry on top, you disgraceful, excessive slob, you should in fact, go off and whip yerself with tree branches instead while running on a treadmill and eating brocolli..." (well, maybe that's just me again... ;) ) Generally though, I think we New Englanders are a bit more reserved than yer average Dub and all this messy whiskey-induced emotion, absolute indulgence and carry-on of the holiday season is both absolutely compelling and a little bit overwhelming at the same time. Either way, there's no denying it's here.