Merry Almost Christmas (Reprise)

Radio fiction. From the actual radio!

Ho, ho, ho.

I always thought it was, “Good tidyings we bring to you and your bin.” I sung that every year of my life for like ten years. No one tells you, you know what I mean? There are no lyrics sheets for Christmas Carols when you sing them in a big mindless group, like so many sheep, in front of the whole school because you didn’t realise choir was a “Recess-thing” when you signed up for it—and, hey, my version made sense. Heaps of sense. Christmas is a time for cleaning I guess, bins like things to be tidy, no one told me I was wrong, bada-bing, bada-boom, ten years pass.

When I found out that it was “Good tidings we bring to you and your kin,” my first question was, What the hell is a tiding? My second question was, Woah, does no one care about me as much as I care about myself?

I started to experiment. I lip synced the national anthem. I got words wrong on purpose. One year, just to see what I could get away with, I sang, “We wish you a hairy biscuit, we wish you a hairy biscuit, we wish you a hairy biscuit, and a happy poo beer.”

No consequences.

Anyway.

Merry almost Christmas. Weird year. I just wanted to take this opportunity to thank you—specifically you—for reading and love-heart reacting these emails. This year’s stories have been a very welcome escape from the, at times, intensely unwelcome intrusion of my corporate job on my schedule, my thoughts, my very purpose for being alive. It’s my sincere hope that some parts of some of these emails brought some of you some joy. Like maybe a smile, that’d be nice. A chuckle would be great. An embarrassing snort on a train would be the ideal.

But it’s not all bad—I’ve learnt in my entry-level marketing job that there is actually no such thing as plagiarism. Plagiarism is a scam invented by academics to prevent people sounding as smart as them. Reusing your own or other people’s work is actually totally ethically okay, even encouraged, in the corporate world, where the practice is known as Leveraging. For example, “Yes, Mark, I can leverage that copy your wrote last quarter. You leverage my back, I’ll leverage yours.”

So, since there’s been a few new subscribers since last year and since I am pathologically lazy, for my final egg of 2021 I’m going to leverage myself.

---

In the altogether un-Christmasy energy of a very wet mid-October (of 2020), I was lucky enough to write and record the following little story for Radio National.

https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/radio-national-fictions/dear-santa/12923396

I’m on right at the start, it goes for like three and a half minutes. Very endurable stuff.

So, thanks for reading/listening, hit the heart icon, and have a good one.