Maria Weiskott

Bah-Humbug? Not So Much
December 21, 2007

They say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, but after several centuries it apparently does. Especially when it comes to pet peeves about the Christmas holiday season; there’s a lot more than a pond that separates us Yanks from our British forbears, that’s for sure. 

This week a press release arrived in my mailbox containing the results of a survey conducted in the UK about pet Christmas peeves among Brits. Merely the top 50 peeves were listed in the press release (50!).

Hard to believe, I thought. That is until I received a voicemail from an agency in the UK wanting to check on something or other. The voicemail began with “Well it sounds like you over there have a jolly old time preparing for Christmas. We are not quite so jolly over here.” No kidding, I thought, the survey fresh in my mind. 

Her jolly comment, though, was in response to the “jolly” message on my voicemail. (If you’ve ever called me, you know just how jolly my messages can be.)

Anyway…it all got me to wondering whether there were pet Christmas peeves skulking around our office. Personally, I don’t have any pet peeves about any holiday – except maybe Ground Hog Day . But that’s a whole other BLOG subject.

So I did a quick and dirty survey of colleagues in adjacent cubes, the names of whom will remain anonymous, lest they be revealed as the Christmas curmudgeons they are.

Well, would you believe, all told, I have only nine peeves to reveal. (Nine! To the Brits 50!)

Here are the results (drum roll)…….

Top on my anecdotal top pet Christmas peeve list: The crowds. This compares with the top Brit peeve of novelty accessories. About crowds, my colleagues note over-crowded stores, excessively long checkout lines in stores, as well as long lines in parking lots and post offices. One of my colleagues was especially effusive in his remarks, stating, his peeve was “commuting with over 100,000 flaming idiots, (he exaggerates, I’m sure), who normally don’t commute and are carrying a half dozen big packages and/or three screaming kids who are on a sugar high and as annoying as all get out.”

Well, okay, then.

The number two pet Christmas peeve among my colleagues are about transportation – road, rail and air – congestion. This compares with “the sales” as the number two Brit peeve. Another of my effusive colleagues (well, we are writers, after all), provided this mental visual: Commuter trains full of folks going home for the holidays who don’t know the first thing about train etiquette and do stuff like get to the top of an escalator and ...stop. (Look out be-low!!!)

The number three, four and five peeves, respectively, surly, overworked store staff and rude people in far greater numbers; not enough time and being overbooked with events; and the incessant Christmas music everywhere including TV commercials.

These compare with the Brits’ number three, four and five peeves: Christmas Carol ringtones, traffic and queues (lines).

My colleagues’ six, seven and eight peeves: all the shopping hype, including fake sales (horrors!), and endless commercials; having to hang out with people you don’t really want to hang with, (or debating whose family to go to on Christmas day); and the shorter, dark days.

This compares with the number six, seven and eight Brit peeves of unwelcome relatives, shopping and Christmas advertisements – bringing us native English-speakers a bit closer Christmas peeve-wise.

Number nine peeve, according to my colleagues, is all the media hype about the “political correctness” that has evolved over the past few years about Christmas and whether we should be saying happy holidays or this or that or Bah-Humbug.

This compares with the ninth peeve in the UK: drunks – about which I have absolutely no comment (except that the number 11 peeve is a hangover). 

Of course there is one in every crowd: we have one colleague here who said his pet Christmas peeve is fruit cake. (Oh, come on!

Some of our readers wrote to us after reading the story on our homepage about the UK survey and contributed their own pet peeves. Complaining was mentioned by several. And one reader had a genuine 21st Century peeve: “e-mail announcements from stores proclaiming free shipping. When you open the e-mail you see that you have to spend much more than you would want to, in order to receive the free shipping.  It should be free shipping for everything, or made clear in the original advertising page!!! How annoying!”

Annoying? Yes indeed – that’s what peeves are all about.

Nevertheless, I will risk your ire by wishing all a very joyful holiday season – whatever you celebrate, do it well.

Posted by Maria Weiskott on December 21, 2007 | Comments (2)