Its that time of the year again

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"I love you always forever, near and far closer together, everywhere I will be with you, everything I will do for you" are lyrics from a 1996 biggest hit single by which artist?

… yeah, you know its coming so grab yourself a glass of bubbly while I sit down and brace yourself while I sing your praises! 😀

But first, I’m going to break with protocol and talk a bit more about numbers. This year, we’ve seen numbers on the blog grow to amounts we couldn’t even imagine was possible at the start of the year, let alone 2 and a half year ago (thereabouts) when we first started Hand Luggage Only.

On the blog, we’ve had over 500,000 readers each month, 22 million viewers per month on Pinterest (yes, you read that right – I was as shocked as you probably are) and the Hand Luggage Only family has grown to over 628,000 of us across the globe! This is a HUGE deal and not one I take lightly at all. THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR BEING A VERY IMPORTANT PART OF HAND LUGGAGE ONLY!!! 🙂

We are so grateful because every experience we’ve had and everything we’ve done on here has been down to you! You’ve inspired, educated, supported and helped us along our way (quite literally too) and I just want to say a HUGE thank you! (I promise this isn’t a ‘drunk New Year’s eve soppy babble‘ I’m totally sober… for now 😉 ). Your support and your kind words mean so much more than I can explain and I am (we both are) truly grateful!

I promised myself I’d keep this short and sweet so I’ll stop by saying thank you once again and raising a huge glass of bubbly to you (*now the drinking begins) – THANK YOU! THANK YOU!! THANK YOU!!! AND A VERY HAPPY NEW YEAR TO YOU!!!

So now that you’re prepared for your staff party, I thought I’d better prepare you for what comes next. Because if you thought standing around with a bunch of work colleagues pretending to be nice to each other was traumatic, just wait till you have to do that same with people you’re actually related to.

I know, I know! The ‘trip home for Christmas’ is supposed to be a joyous occasion, a chance to catch up with the folks and your siblings, run into a few old school friends and say hi to the family dog which incredibly is still somehow alive.

Well it’s not. Your parents are happy to see you because there’s been a slowly growing list of things they need fixing that only you can fix (and don’t for a second assume they’re bothered to remember their Apple ID), meanwhile all your old friends from home now look at you with a healthy dose of skepticism, as if you’ve just walked into a camp of bedraggled survivors in some kind of Mad Max’esque hellscape.

Oh and the family dog? yeah sure it’s still kicking, but it’s fat as fuck and doesn't even remember you anymore, which is probably the most upsetting thing out of everything.

Anyway, before you even get there, you’ve gotta go and sort out some presents for everyone, which you haven’t done yet have you?

Let’s not forget the purpose of Christmas presents, again — if you’re assuming joy… You’d be dead wrong.

No, the giving of presents is the physical manifestation of a kind of cold war fought among siblings. Who’s going to find the best gifts? who’s going to be the star of Christmas and achieve ‘favourite child’ status. Who’s going to prove their apparent success by the worth of their gifts? Yeah, you can claim that this isn’t a thing, but deep down, down there in the depths of your soul, you know it to be true.

Anyway, forget all that, because the guests are arriving now. Cousins and Aunties and Uncles and your old Nanna and some boyfriend of someone and why don’t they have their own Christmas to go to? and now you’ve got to deal with all those conversations… you know the ones.

You know what’s coming don’t you? It’s going to happen about seven and a half minutes into the meal, once we’ve talked about the new couch and about who so-and-so just got engaged to someone else, and what ever happened to their old boyfriend Garry who everyone liked? Didn’t he become an actor? And it’ll be right about there, that the uncle that doesn’t really have an opinion on anything but knows how to really get things going is going to take a big sip of wine, exhale with that slightly high pitched sigh and say ‘What about all this Harvey Weinstein stuff eh’?

Are you ready? you better be. Because it’s going to come up and I can guarantee people are going to Matt Damon the shit out of this and you’re going to have to spend the next twenty minutes explaining the nuances of #MeToo, Rape Culture, Victim Blaming and hell, probably the entire concept of a patriarchy and crucially, why it’s problematic.

And by the time you’re finished, someone will almost certainly tell you you’ve ruined Christmas, but hopefully, just hopefully there’s an impressionable young cousin that listened to it all.

Than again, there’s always this option:

So the guests leave, and yeah, everyone agreed to disagree and now it’s just you and the folks again and ‘let’s have another bottle of wine and watch a movie shall we’ and you know exactly what Christmas movie you want to watch, but after your twenty minute rant at dinner you feel like you’ve probably done enough, so you let it slide and… and well this happens doesn't it.

Never underestimate the speed at which a slightly drunk Baby Boomer will fall asleep once you sit them in front of some moving images with corresponding sound, they’re very much like toddlers in that regard.

Anyway, enjoy the film because that’s about it until New Years Eve, but that’s a whole other thing to deal with.