Have Christmas early Ð to spend whatÕs left before the budget

Date Published: {J}

There are only nine weeks to Christmas, but by the time it gets here we’ll be lucky if we can afford the stuffing, never mind the turkey.

We were already facing a hairshirt budget before last week’s Anglo Irish bill came floating through the letter box – now there’s a strong chance that there will be a hairshirt levy and a tax on buttons as well.So, like a condemned man set for his last supper, why not bring Christmas forward by around a month so that we can enjoy one final festive season before we turn out the lights as we all leave the island?Saturday, November 27, is exactly four weeks earlier than the date originally pencilled in for Christmas but also it’s more than a week ahead of Brian Lenihan’s budget.

There are two ways we can do this – either everyone gets involved and we therefore prove that, even if we can’t move mountains of debt, we can moved holidays. Or we keep it fairly quiet which means we’ll also keep costs down.

Given that it’s a weekend night, we won’t even have to take the children out of school – although we will have to clear it with Santa so that the presents arrive ahead of schedule.

The great man would probably appreciate the move though, because it must be getting harder and harder to visit every home on the planet over just one night – this way he’d at least have the back broken on Galway.

The butcher would have to be informed that turkeys are required a little earlier this year, but we could probably save on some costs – and we’d definitely avoid the last minute rush.

We’d have less visitors on our alternative Christmas Day and even if they dropped in, half of them would be off the drink for November so it wouldn’t be such an expensive evening to host.

There wouldn’t be a blockbuster movie on the box, but there’s always a DVD that would be infinitely more recent that the ‘Christmas premiere’ anyway – and in either event you’d probably be anxious to go for a brisk walk in your new sweater.

Then when the real Christmas comes around we might stretch to the price of a decent chicken and we could still have a nice dinner without the presence of a couchload of elderly aunties, gently snoring, asleep from the sherry.

Or we could gatecrash someone else’s Christmas, enjoying a last morsel of turkey for free, explaining that we did all of this a month earlier in case the world really did end on Budget Day.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.