18 December 2006
Fascinating Festive Fact #18: More than 70% of Christmas shopping accidents are directly or indirectly attributable to a substance known as gluehwein.
Anna says:
Weaving through the streets, laden down with bags of consumerisms and consumables (and consumable consumerismables), the hoardes of Christmas shoppers have always, even at the best of times, been as graceful on the move as a herd of buffalo in full-leg casts. A herd of buffalo in full-leg casts carrying shopping.
Groaning with Yuletide Mirth and grumbling with Festive Cheer, the solid, sweaty mass of joy-givers move through the city streets, elbowing, shoving and pushing anyone that gets in their way with ill-disguised Tidings of Comfort and Joy.
It's hard to believe that presents bought and borne with such enormous malice would ever produce much happiness in giving or recieving. You'd think that the item would be suffused through with the spirit of violent ill-feeling, such was the nature of it's consumer conception, and that anyone to recieve and unwrap it would suddenly start stomping around and growling 'geddoudamifukinway'.
They're a dangerous mob, the Christmas Shoppers. It has always been advisable to keep out of their way. And that was when they were sober.
In the last few years however, a worrying yuletide trend has sprung up in town squares and market halls all over Britain. People have started to offer these marauding ram-shoppers hot alcohol. The explosion of German Christmas markets in the UK has been a well-documented phenomenon over the last decade or so, but nowhere can it be more physically demonstrated than in the rampaging consumers of Christmas Present(s).
Quaint-looking wooden shacks pop up, hither and there, and armed only with a large saucepan, some cheap plonk and an industrial-sized teabag full of 'Ach Du Leiber!', Germany's best selling mulling spices (for Gluhwein, which is, after all, just a wrong name for mulled wine), a heady mix including nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, sugar, brandy and bratwurst. The shoppers, drunk on debt and Crimble-music, flock to the shacks, drawn by the warm, homely smell, and detained by the powerful, comatising effect of the booze.
And then, Gluhweined to the ears, the wander off shopping again. See, they're just as angry as before, just as determined to buy, buy, queue and buy. Elbows out. but now they're drunk. Mulled in brain and Muntered in demeanor, they rush back into their mission of joyful giving and goodwill to all men.
Get out of their way. Drunk in charge of a holiday - they're full of the Christmas Spirit.
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