sitting on the kitchen side it looks

kinda like a bride in all her finery.

the icing’s smooth and just so dazzling

it doesn’t look like something one could eat.

it’s perfect, a little too much so.

and when i take a knife and press it through the flesh

i see that all is not as ordered and as perfect

as it looked when looking from afar.

the perfect fucking christmas

is all a jumbled mess.

there is no rhyme or reason to that chaos

that reigns the day itself.

it’s full of mishaps, arguments and tears.

the fruit inside will never form a pattern.

and the nuts will always go

wherever the fuck they want.

you can dress it up, with icing sickly sweet,

marzipan and sugared fruit, organised on top.

but we all know that underneath

those smiling facebook photographs,

there isn’t such a thing as ordered fruit and nuts.

they will do whatever the fuck they please,

because the perfect fucking christmas

is just a construct made to tease.

I try and try every year to make my Christmas perfect and it’s normally by around 9am on the day that I realise it’s not going to pan out that way. Because it’s impossible. The perfect day doesn’t exist.

We put all this pressure on ourselves because the adverts show us what this perfect day looks like but what we seem to forget is that the supermarkets who create these ads have been designing them since fucking February.

So give it a rest this month. There is a chance that someone will get sick or die, someone else will fall out with the family and run off to Australia on Christmas Eve, granny will say something inappropriate at the table and the turkey will get so burnt that all the smoke alarms in the house go off. But that is what Christmas is about. It’s one day and it’s a pressure cooker of a day at that.

Just take a deep breath and enjoy what you can. You are doing awesome no matter what it looks like from the inside. The people around you love you and the TV is normally quite good too!

Much love,

Rachel xx