They were desperate for people to help at the Churches
Together in Hornington stall at the town Christmas fair last Saturday, so I
volunteered to go along for an hour. When I turned up there were in fact plenty
of other attendants but I stayed anyway. We were supposed to be spreading the
message of ecumenical peace and Christmas cheer by distributing packs of tea
and biscuits from a Christian charity, tiny pots of bubble mixture for
children, and wrapping shoppers’ presents. The ebullient member of the Roman
Catholic congregation who shared my hour with me didn’t realise that most of
the customers who visited us with presents to be inexpertly bundled in shiny paper
and wreaths of sticky tape were members of other churches – I did – but
eventually a few real people came by too. The very last, just as my hour was
ending, was a young woman clutching a pink flamingo watering-can she’d selected
as her workplace Secret Santa gift (an appalling custom which causes no end of
angst and horror). ‘I was listening to a radio programme the other day which
was saying how everything to do with flamingos is very popular at the moment’,
I told her, a fashion of which she claimed to be unaware, having just grabbed
it in a shop along the High Street. I decided that, along with my colleague,
having wrapped that, there was nowhere else to go creatively, and I left to go
and buy a helium-filled gold star for the nursery nativity service.
Flamingos, eh? Handy tip. Always useful to know what is lurking out there and needs to be to avoided as shops and shoppers go into Yuletide overdrive.
ReplyDeleteAre they tastier than turkey?
ReplyDeleteNot when they're plastic.
ReplyDelete