‘WHAT
I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS’Dear Santa, this Christmas I’d like a worldwide cure for Aids and peace in the Middle East. Oh, and a Jaguar XK8, convertible. Also, perhaps a jolly good roasting from a premier league football team. Sorry, isn’t that allowed? It seems that we’re only allowed to embrace the ‘true meaning of Christmas’ or choose to sell our souls to the satanic darkside of commercialism and hedonistic excess. Pick the side you’re on - wear your hair-shirt of self-righteousness with carefully concealed pride, or wear your Manolo Blahniks and roast in eternal damnation. Well, bollocks to all that, this Christmas I want it all.
It’s like choosing what positive person clique you belong to. It seems sometimes like we’re classified into two distinct groups - there’s the ‘No brigade’ - an orgy of self-denial, ‘no’ to drink or drugs or clubs or late nights or fast food or fun. Or the others who writhe around in self-destructive K-hole bareback-bonking sessions. You’re either Ozzy Osbourne, all rampant rock and roll, or Marie Osmond, saccharine sweet country. But you can’t be a hermaphrodite hybrid. It’s black and white, baby. Well, this season I’d like to promote grey.
Why shouldn’t we accept that Christmas is now the season of peace and getting pissed? A jaunty juxtaposition of all things sacred and all things profane? I love Christmas, it’s so deliciously diverse. I love the crisp stillness of early Christmas morning, the dazzling look of wonder dancing across my children’s faces as they gaze awestruck at what Santa miraculously left for them. I love the fresh purifying smell of pine, the uplifting sound of carols swelling my soul with the recognition of the many blessings in my life and the beauty of family and humanity. I also love getting so drunk that I have to projectile vomit out of the taxi window on the 5am journey home, after a night of shockingly shameful excess.
I love eyeing the presents in gloriously gaudy designer packaging for ME ME ME. I love the sound of champagne corks popping, I love revelling in blinding, brilliant bacchanalia and J-Lo bling.
I believe that Christmas is the perfect season to embrace our personal diversity,
accept the Mr Hyde as well as the Dr Jekyll that lurks within us. Christmas
is supposed to be about forgiveness, so forgive yourself for having aspects
of your personality that aren’t exactly saintly, and enjoy it. Let’s
delight in how gloriously three-dimensional we are.
Let’s bin the HIV positive person stereotypes that seem to be imposed on us. It seems that ‘materials’ for positive people are either aimed at gay men, who apparently are only able to understand text that contains words like ‘fuck’ or ‘cum’. Or aimed at people from African communities (clumped into a single culture for marketing purposes), who can only understand uncontroversial words with one syllable. Has anyone stopped to think that it might be possible that there are some gay men out there with a diverse vocabulary who believe in God, or people from Africa, also with a diverse complex vocabulary, who enjoy fucking? Or incredibly, positive people who don’t fit into either category?
I struggle to find a meaningful difference between my pre- and post-positive-person Christmases. Except that perhaps my mother now nags me about the dangers of drink to my fragile CD4 count, when before she nagged me about the dangers of drink to my fragile chastity. But should Christmas really be different for those with dodgy immunity? I suppose excessive drinking isn’t really a proven immunity booster and there have been studies showing that cocaine makes HIV positive mice lose T-cells (did their evil mouse dealer charge them £55 a gram and cut their coke with scouring powder? Did their CD4 count really go down because they were up all night partying on the mouse-wheel rather than because of their odd rodent drug habit?). I suppose we should be cautious about eating half-cooked, salmonella-infested turkey. I guess we should avoid throwing snowballs with clumps of toxoplasmosis doggy do-do. But I don’t believe that being HIV positive should be a barrier to enjoying the rich diversity of Christmas. Merry Christmas. Happy Chanukah. Wicked Kwanzaa. Whatever turns you on.
