If Christmas Sucks

It's Christmas Eve! And instead of writing about the amount of Christmas puddings I plan on binge-eating tonight in my sleep, I'd like to talk about something a little more important, and actually, less funny.

The other day, having finished watching every Hallmark Christmas film known to man (if you haven't discovered these already, they're an absolute gem - terrifically horrible acting, a plot line as flat as something flat that I can't think of at the moment, and if you're lucky enough, Candace Cameron Bure, attempting to convince us that she "just loves Christmas" unlike anyone else on the planet. More on this later.)...so anyway, the other day, having finished watching it, I started looking through the Christmas stuff on Netflix, and when I came across Christmas with the Kranks, I felt a really bizarre feeling, sort of like frustration and exasperation. It didn't take me long to realize why, and that was when I decided this was something I needed to tell you.

The Last Day of My 20s

It’s 8 pm, the sky is black, and I just finished a Skype call with my family, whose laughing faces were illuminated by lazy Sunday brunch sunshine. I’m an ocean away, in the bedroom of our little apartment. Two doors away, in the living room, I hear the rustling of gift wrap. I am banned from that room for the night: Jeff is preparing a birthday surprise.  Tomorrow, as previously feared, I will be 30. From the vault of my ridiculous and unfounded worries: I will wake up covered in menopause, with a sudden penchant for raisin scones and trousers that button up just at tit level. Tomorrow is the first day of a new decade, and for the first time in my life, I feel like age means something. I mean, I’m not even sure what’ll happen when the gods above see my un-finished 30 before 30 list, but now I’ve also gotta explain (to someone?) why I don’t want kids or a mortgage (…yet.) 

I'm lucky that my friends are all relatively the same age, and we're all making this leap into this new decade, one by one, like popcorn kernels. Meanwhile, in Ireland, because moving to another country wasn't enough change, I decided to round up my favourite memories from this decade, to hopefully stop my ears from ringing with the fear that I'm going to be Ye Aulde with nothing to show for it.