There are so many things to celebrate this time of year. Most pressing on most people’s minds is the fast approach of Christmas. Even slightly more elevated in our minds is the fact that the Advertiser is now entered its second year. Being a toddler, it now stands on stronger legs and endeavours to get into every press. Should we find skeletons in the cupboard we treat them as respectfully as possible.

It is great to hear a person enquiring when is the Advertiser coming out. It is great to see kids faces light up when they see their pictures beam back at them. It is great that so many people want to collect every issue, a sure sign that something is being done properly. I personally, behind my thin veil of anonymity, am glad that people will take finger to key and e-mail me with observation, criticism or threats of actual grievous bodily harm.

The word we most commonly use in the context of Christmas is that we are going to celebrate it. The word celebrate is so closely linked to celebrity. As so succinctly pointed out by Kicker last month the word celebrity has become illegitimised recently (Ed tells me to watch the language after Kickers tirade last month, so I can no longer say bastardised). Overnight celebrity status courtesy of so-called reality contests has left us with a glut of minor celebrities ill prepared for the limelight. Their fame is more akin to a sparkler spitting bits of light at you and likely to burn the pads off your finger than it is like a candle in the wind.

So rather than celebrate Christmas this year, I suggest we fully immerse ourselves in sharing the joy that is Christmas time. The best present we can get at Christmas is the time to spend with family and friends. We get the opportunity to recharge the batteries before we step back up onto the treadmill that we allow our lives to become. One joyful heart warming Christmas experience at Christmas time has the potential to get you through many frantic frenetic hours in the months to come.

Would we be happy to spend Christmas in a stable with family and friends? We might be if it had central heating and a playstation. Some people will spend Christmas in hostels and doorways. Many people spend Christmas with feelings of loneliness and loss. Christmas should always be more about people than possessions.

I am not going to sit on my orange box and get all righteous. I have over-indulged with the best of them. It would feel like trying to be as pure as a reformed former prostitute (cannot say hoor thanks to Kicker, ya ballcock). What I would urge people to do is to try to make sure that next Christmas there are not more people approaching Christmas with a feeling of foreboding, dread, loss and loneliness.

The reality is there will be loss of life on our roads, there will be violence on our streets and illegal substances will cause overdose and death. Everyone has become an expert on Cocaine in the last fortnight. This does not excuse peoples lack of knowledge about it previous to this. We are in the dangerous position now that drug use and drug culture has become so prevalent and so accepted that it finds its way into our humourous anecdotes and urban legends.

Even I get occasionally surprised. A lady lately said to me that she was at a party where the others were so lacking in stimuli and were not particularly attractive. This lead to her contemplating putting a Rohypnol into her own drink in the hope that something might happen that she would not remember the next morning. This was said in a humourous vein but that medication being dropped into someones drink has lead to a lot of suffering and pain.

There was a time when a person wishing for snow for Christmas was of the fluffy white variety that fell from the skies and from which snowballs and snowmen could be made. How times have changed. Another friend of mine tells me that if you go into any party in even the more minor towns nowadays that it is like arriving in Lapland there is so much snow around to snort. Yet another got nostalgic as he remembered putting drops of Olbas Oil on his spliffs if he had a cold. It had the added bonus of masking the distinctive smell.

Let me try and put it to you this way. If you get out your mop bucket and into it put a splash of bleach, followed by a dash of toilet cleaner, add a few tots of disinfectant, top off with a squirt of cream cleanser and some muscular drain cleaner. Add very hop water and leave to be stirred but not shaken. It would be potentially very dangerous to stand over the vapours of this cocktail. You are taking products out of your press that are tried and tested, but they are not tried and tested together. When added together and topped with boiling water to produce a vapour you are setting off a very different chemical reaction. Please do not mix your chemicals like this.

Every weekend our young people are putting products that are nor tried and tested into their bodies. They are adding them to other chemicals, mainly ethanol. They are creating a very different chemical reaction, sometimes an unknown reaction. They are performing chemical experiments in their body and putting a Bunsen burner under their arse.

If they could see the image of a persons face caked with vomit and Ipicac as health professionals try to pump a stomach. If they could see a body going from seizure into next seizure as a brain fries. If they could see a body covered with abscesses and sores, unable to perform what we consider normal bodily functions. If they could see bodies ravaged with Aids waiting to be put into body bags that only a few undertakers in the country would handle. Maybe an educational video with some of these images might do more good than Stand Tall programmes or the like.

So, this Christmas, do not put anything smaller than your elbow into your ear, and do not put anything into your body that you can not trace back where it comes from. I once knew a fine gentleman who went to school in this town about three decades ago. He went to the Big Smoke and bought a wee sachet of white powder. He sniffed deeply expecting wonderful things. He was snorting Bread Soda. It nearly burnt the nose off him. He got out of hospital looking something like the lady who used to be in Eastenders who sneezed out the middle section of her nose.

Four young people that we know of have died in recent weeks. Some are said to have taken contaminated Cocaine. By definition all Cocaine is contaminated. The various items cut through it to make it go further and to keep it dry are many any varied. If you are lucky it was talcum powder that was used, if less lucky it was rat poison. It invariable depends on the cynicism or ruthlessness of the drug dealer. Wake up and smell the roses while you still have full use of an intact nose. Fleeting celebrity or fleeting notoriety brings with it a personal self-destruct button.

This Christmas let us hope that the only snow comes from the sky, that visions of Lapland include a fat man with a beard and not a slumped head in someone’s lap as a body approaches overdose. Spend time with your families and friends; do not lose time in untested chemical experiments. Take care when you mop that floor too, certain chemicals are not intended to be mixed.

May everyone have a happy, healthy and homely Christmas, and may the New Year bring to you all that you wish of it.an

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