Yours

December 3rd

Dear Sophia,

I love you.

Today the place looked really different. You looked as good as ever but everything else was a bit unsettling. It was annoying.

I’ve never really got Christmas decorations. We always had a tree but we never had big glowing reindeer outside the house or any of those stupid things people have that you can see from miles away. I guess I should have realised everything would be like this once it was December. Christmas adverts were on T.V weeks ago.

Literally everything in Starbucks seemed to have been done all Christmassy. All the things up on the walls. They even had that stuff on the ceiling and the cookies and stuff were Christmassy too. It’s like once everyone agrees it’s nearly Christmas nothing is allowed to not be to do with Christmas anymore. I don’t get why shops do that. I’m going in there in the morning anyway and I don’t need a load of new posters put up to remind me that Christmas exists while I do that.

I know that might sound grumpy but it’s not. I’ve just never really been into Christmas and I don’t like people trying to force things on me. Obviously it’ll be fun when we have kids and we can watch them open their presents and get all excited about Santa and stuff like that. It’s just at the moment the idea that I have to be excited about Christmas just because it’s a certain time of year gets to me a bit. I don’t like that.

There is a town in Alaska that is actually called the North Pole. When I was a kid I never wrote a letter to Santa or anything like that but I think if you do send a letter addressed to the North Pole that’s where it ends up. All the shops there are probably all Christmassy all the time. I bet it’s horrible. At school the kids there have to reply to the letters kids send as part of their lessons. They give themselves elves names and write replies to the kids around the world. That’s the magic of Christmas. Some kids write to some slightly older kids who write back to them. I bet it’s such a depressing place to be. Imagine having to force yourself to be happy and Christmassy all the time. It’d really get to you I think. A bunch of kids there tried to shoot up their school. That’s not the only town in America where that’s happened though I guess. What happened was all the kids watched lots of movies and thought they knew what to do. They’d given themselves things they had to do before they would go around the school and shoot all the kids they didn’t like. One of them was in charge of cutting all the phone lines which is stupid because everyone has mobile phones these days anyway. It’s scary to think someone who doesn’t really know what they’re doing could accidentally end up doing something terrifying and hurting someone. If they’d gone through with it all they were going to go to the train station and get the next train out of town. They hadn’t bothered to check when the next train was and it wasn’t until evening. They would have just had to spend hours sitting at the station waiting after they had killed all their classmates. Luckily the kid who was meant to bring the guns for everyone never turned up so it didn’t happen.

Obviously they wouldn’t have gotten away with it but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have been able to ruin some lives before they got caught. Nobody saw it coming. I bet the people in North Pole don’t like to talk about that too much. I bet they don’t like to admit that forcing people to be happy all the time can end up with people acting out against it. It wouldn’t be good for business and that’s what Christmas is about now after all.

That’s why I was so pleased when I saw you roll your eyes when you came in. You and your friend looked around and laughed a bit. You didn’t seem impressed by all the new decorations either. We’re always on the same page with stuff like that.

I love you.

Yours,

Andrew