Like it or not, Christmas is bearing down upon us. It’s a special time for over-eating, socially sanctioned inebriation and, most importantly, for realising that your immediate family are a bunch of truly appalling, hateful people. T’was ever thus. When I was a kid, growing up with an agony aunt mother who ran her business salving emotional pain and distress from home, the busiest two weeks of the year were always the ones immediately following Christmas. The break stopped families getting away from each other. Cooped up at home because of the weather, crowds of people would end up writing to my mother announcing they now wished to divorce their irritating spouses or put their dreadful children up for adoption or both.
It could have been worse. For decades, many British families have learned to sublimate their festering rage over the festive period, through the medium of cheap chocolate: in particular, via arguments over the contents of the shared Christmas Quality Street tin. By fighting with each other over who ate all the orange cremes, and why there are only toffee pennies left and for God’s sake, you know exactly how important the green triangles are to me, generations of us have avoided arguing about anything of real importance. We bitch and squabble over crap confectionery and, satisfied that we have somehow made our point, retreat into a fine British position of quiet, sturdy mutual contempt.
Well, brace yourselves. Nestlé, the current custodians of the Quality Street brand, have screwed this up. I would go so far as to say that they have risked ruining Christmas for millions of British households. Quality Street functioned as a pressure valve for family antagonism precisely because you never knew exactly what you would get in the tin. This year, Nestlé has created a pick-and-mix system, hosted within every branch of John Lewis. For a mere £15, you can create your own mix of a minimum of three, and a maximum of nine, of their classics. You want only caramel cups, purple ones and toffee pennies? (Ludicrous example. Nobody actually wants the toffee pennies. Apart from my wife. She’s weird.) That’s exactly what you can have. They’ll even print your name on the lid.
Worst of all, it’s a massive hit. On a Monday lunchtime, weeks out from the festivities, London’s Oxford Street branch was full of people literally queuing up to destroy their own families from the inside. I went. I did it. I was the one who asked for a three-way split between those caramel cups, purple ones and toffee pennies. I took the tin home. We opened it and were faced by the unhealthiest thing possible: instant gratification. No arguments. No rows. One for me. One for her. One for the youngest. And the stone-cold certainty that without this to fight over, we were going to have to argue about something that actually mattered.
There is a bitter irony to it being sold only through dear old John Lewis. The department store is practically regarded as a place of worship for Britain’s godless middle classes; a tribe that specifically hates arguments. They want everything to be nice. They would rather pour molten iron on their own feet and stick pins in their eyes than actually say what they really think or feel about each other. And yet, by buying into this latest Quality Street marketing wheeze, this destruction of the traditional way of muddling through, they’re going to end up doing just that. I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news but Christmas 2018 is utterly buggered.
