Time Santa, please

Dear Santa,

Thank you for last year's presents. How I ever managed without a tongue-scraper or a potato-powered alarm clock or a tray that dispenses ice cubes in the shape of pineapples is a mystery. Anyway, I hope you'll be dropping by again tonight, because I've really, really tried to be a good woman all year and God knows, it hasn't been easy.

I'm writing this sitting at the kitchen table - lying on it, actually. The presents I bought in a spare two and half seconds this morning were all gift-wrapped there and then by a truly vicious looking shop assistant. Clever - huh?

Now my head is wrecked trying to remember which shape is for who. I've just whacked lumps out of the turkey trying to force stuffing into its stiff little bottom (it'll thaw, sometime); threatened to kill the children for - oh, any number of transgressions such as trying to sing or speak or move; smacked the cat's snout out of the sherry trifle; and ordered my surly spouse into the mucky darkness to find some holly with expletive-deleted berries on it for a change. None of them is speaking to me now.

Anyone from outside this charmed little circle foolish enough to want to exchange wishes of peace and goodwill, is barred; I've just pulled the telephone cable out of the wall. And the doorbell, praise the Infant Jesus, isn't working. I've a crateful of vodka at my feet but forgot to buy potatoes.

I've also just found the fabulously tasteful cards I bought a month ago and forgot to send. I don't even know why I'm writing to you since I haven't written to anyone for about 15 years. Anyway, I'd like a surprise - but perhaps you'd actually put a bit of time and thought into it this time. I don't need a fish-shaped, waterproof radio to hang in the shower. You're Santa, for pity's sake. You're supposed to know these things.

Ho ho ho etc,

Kathy

No, the turkey won't be frozen (hopefully, you only buy a frozen turkey on Christmas Eve once without knowing it will still be frozen on Christmas Day - then you learn) but the rest is about right. Perfection it is not. But the pathetic, perennial truth is, there are hundreds of thousands of us today who aspire to it. Perfection. It's impossible, but we strive.

Cast a quick (make that very quick) glance across the glossy magazine racks: "100 ways to wrap"; "300 gorgeous garlands"; "400 easy-peasy ways to transform the skip into a winter wonderland"; "Make 500 Christmas canapes in five minutes"; "Dazzle 'em - lose four stone in a week"; "Grow your own fairy/tree/chestnuts/free range pig in a day"; "Fix your own plane and fly 'em to the North Pole" . . .

Our heads say it's nonsense; our hearts say that's how it should be. Perfection is increasingly demanded of us all year round, but Christmas is the Big One. Having created this wholly imaginary deadline of the 25th, everyone has something that must be done by Christmas Day; do the deal; lay the new floor; paint the house; tile the bathroom; connect the chandelier; clean out the junk room; get the hall-light fixed (broken since February) . . . So a year's worth of thwarted plans is crammed into two weeks and we come over all Martha Stewart (America's doyenne of catering and decoration).

I've never baked a cookie in my life so why do I feel the children will shrivel if I personally fail to bake some for the Christmas tree? Why would a woman get into a lather about buying canned chestnuts instead of peeling her own? Why, when she's conquered the Earth and got all the presents, does she feel despair when a deranged style writer tells her that the wrapping is more important than the present inside, because "in our pressured lives, it suggests time and effort"?

As if this weren't enough, these domestic achievements are worthless unless they appear effortless. Shouting and cursing; red faces; a hunted-looking spouse and flinching children are dead giveaways in this regard. Effortless perfection is the contemporary style queen's Holy Grail.

"They'll take me as they find me," she lies poisonously, meanwhile approaching the season with the equivalent of a battle plan. She has pre-ordered the food, mapped out the meals, ordered boxes of scented candles, cinnamon-laced wreaths and hand-blown baubles from Prague and, even as we speak, has time on hand (imagine it) to agitate about paying that extra £20 for a Blue Spruce when it doesn't even have the authentic scent of that pot-pourri she sniffed in Brown Thomas.

All achieved in a little-nothing dress, ladderless tights, heels and full make-up. Hounding ourselves to perfection, it's called. And truly, deeply, sadly, it's all meant to be fun. A woman zipping through a country town on business last week found herself racing into a toy store, filling the Santa list and racing out again - all in about seven minutes flat. But was she a happy elf? No siree.

"It's probably the last year for Santa in our house," she wailed, tearfully. "I should have had time to wander around and savour it . . . But I was flying through and I just didn't know when I'd see a big toy shop again." Time, Santa. That's what you'll find on most adults' wish-lists this year. The days fly past like the manic flip-up calendars in a Frank Capra movie. Meanwhile, The Little Book Of Calm hogs the best-seller lists week after week.

Last year, Dunnes Stores in Cornelscourt opened for one round-the-clock shopping session before Christmas. This year, they did four. And yes, people did go shopping at 4 a.m.; serious shopping too, with multiple trolley-loads.

An English survey carried out recently confirms the trend towards a 24hour society and an end to the family Christmas. Joining the traditional Christmas shifts of doctors, nurses, utility workers and broadcasters, is a growing army of white-collar employees and even lawyers. Most of those questioned felt employers' attitudes towards Christmas had significantly altered in the past decade, with the traditional respect for bank holidays jettisoned in favour of "flexibility" - a euphemism for longer hours.

That lovely dream-time between Christmas Day and New Year's Eve is fast disappearing for some. Many employees now accept that they will be swept back to work immediately after the day itself because of the pressures of the global market and new technologies. According to the survey, 19 per cent of companies will take a short break or no break at all.

Leading the trend is the retail sector where 31 per cent of staff will carry on working. With more people opting to eat out on Christmas Day, the catering industry comes a close second with 23 per cent. Companies such as First Direct banking will keep its three call centres in Leeds open on Christmas Day. Midland Bank workers voted to strike in protest at being told to work on Christmas Eve.

But we have also brought much of the everyday pressure upon ourselves. Not just offices but many homes now bristle with technology - phones, fax, e-mail, mobiles. Everyone is contactable everywhere, all the time. "Connecting people not places", boasts the Eircell advertisement. And the attitude is: if not, why not? It's common now to hear someone complain about the pressures imposed by e-mail alone. How will we cope in five years time when, they say, the speed of communication will have accelerated by a factor of 40? Affluence and money have imposed their own peculiar tensions. A few years ago, a couple needing a break might have set off on a leisurely Friday evening for a country hotel. Now they exchange their supermarket points for air tickets, head for the airport on Thursday evening, lose their passports, arrive there panting, find the flight delayed by two hours . . . and endure it all in reverse on the return leg, arriving back in the early hours to a rebellious babysitter, a sleepless night and scrambled brain next day in the office.

The pressure to entertain and be entertained, to get to the gym, to write a book, learn a language, take a cookery course, see the "right" movies, know your wines, have a child in Trinity, keep in touch with friends and family, look rested, bright, laid-back and alert (and all at the same time) is relentless. "I could do all that", says a young mother of two, "if I didn't go to bed at all".

Another vowed to make 1998 the year she was going to "slow down". She intends, single-handedly, to re-introduce the concept of manana to our manic state. Others feel the only way to do it is to shut people out: "You've got to be Machiavellian about it though. You need to do it with a degree of grace."

It may be the route to survival but it sounds sinister, a sort of final surrender to the demands of the marketplace; the ultimate triumph of the head over the heart.

This year, the artist commissioned to create the annual Christmas tree for London's Tate Gallery broke with tradition by displaying only a large bin filled to the brim with rubbish - seasonal rubbish: Christmas leftovers; empty bottles; drink cans; used Christmas paper; broken decorations; the packaging from toys, gifts or food products and dead or broken Christmas trees. The work's title? Christmas Tree 1997.

Michael Landy wanted to show "the aftermath of Christmas . . . to draw attention to the conspicuous consumption which so often surrounds the festive season".

In a highly entertaining and thoughtful radio interview recently, Bishop Brendan Comiskey suggested that we review the notion of Advent as a time of waiting (instead of wanton splurge and celebrating), rather like Lent is a time of waiting for Easter. "A sort of pre-Christmas fitness schedule?" suggested Pat Kenny. "Exactly", said the bishop, "sign up with your local presbytery . . . Yes, a neutron-in-Advent or something like that . . " It makes sense of course. Even in a country which some have consigned to Hell as a godless place in thrall to the market, there still exists a sense of right and wrong. It was striking that one of the most common topics of conversation at pre-Christmas gatherings was the Budget gift (our gift, really) of £20 million to the GAA. Such discussions invariably included a series of "what ifs . . ." What if that money had been given to St Vincent de Paul? To youth projects in the heroin-shattered inner cities? To the disabled and those who care for them? To sorting out the traveller accommodation problem? What it proves is that there is love abroad and a yearning for peace and goodwill to all. The spirit of Christmas is alive and well. We just need time to think about it. And then to actually do something about it.