The comedian Bill Bailey once told me about his favourite Christmas. He and his family headed off to a sunny island where, on Christmas Day, they ate jam sandwiches and played on the beach. Bailey didn’t have a name for his rebellion against the 57 varieties of A Christmas Carol, the Christ-awful seasonal dishes, tinsel and the craving for something at 11am on 25 December to obliterate the pervading sense of buyers’ remorse. But now we do. What Bailey felt, even as sand got into his beard and lunch, was Jomo, the Joy of Missing Out. It is the antidote to the curse of our age: Fomo, the Fear of Missing Out.
Fomo rises exponentially from now to the end of the year, as we begin our descent via the hellish portal of Black Friday towards the moment we celebrate what – be still, irony – turns out not to have been the birthday of Our Lord. The society-wide pressure, always intense throughout the year, is to achieve what we assume everybody else is experiencing – perfect happiness in the bosom of our families, ideally with our brats thrilled that Santa’s bought them the evident piece of junk that retailers are touting as this Yuletide’s must-have, namely Poopsie Unicorn Slime Surprise (£49.99). Guess what the surprise of the Poopsie Unicorn Slime Surprise is? Magical multicoloured poop comes out of the unicorn’s bottom. I don’t know if toy unicorn faeces can be composted, but it’s unlikely. If that’s the best we can manage to celebrate Christmas, heaven knows it’s no wonder we’re miserable now.
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