Dear Santa

It's the most wonderful time of the year ....

Is it really?

Okay, I'm not a total scrooge where Christmas is concerned, and to be honest, it's only really this year I've gone all bah humbug to this degree, but it seems to have been going on since the end of September. There is such a thing as over-kill. I like sparkly lights and crackers as much as the next person, but summer seems to have merged into the most expensive time of the year without much of a break inbetween.

I'll put out a bit of a statement for shock value here - I've never been in a relationship at Christmas. I choose to see the positives in this, no present buying, no having to spend Christmas dinner in two different locations, no having to put on a pretend smile when the potential in-laws buy you a hideous top you wouldn't even wear to a fancy dress party. Of course there are down sides also, it's a warm, snuggly, coupled up time of year, and I spend it snuggled up to my Jack Russell - which is fine, because let's face it, he's a hell of a lot more reliable and will never let me down. I can also sit and scoff an entire tub of Celebrations without anyone shaking their head at me and looking disapproving. I don't care that I won't fit into my jeans on 1 January, nobody else will either - that's what January's there for, hardcore dieting and never leaving the house after you get in from work. It's such a happy, joyful month, don't you think?

I know I'm not really giving off the right kind of vibes to agree with this, but I do like Christmas really, I like food, I like presents and I like chocolate very much. What I hate with a total and utter passion is New Year. New Year swiftly follows Christmas, and I have an impending feeling of doom from Boxing Day.

Whilst Christmas might be a potential snuggled up couple time, New Year most definitely is, and a time of looking at what you haven't got, or didn't do in the previous year that you swore you would. I get depressed on  New Year's eve, so I often don't go out, but then I feel like I should be out and I get even more fed up, so just try to pretend it's a normal day and that those fireworks at midnight are just coincidence and the fact my phone won't stop bleeping from 11.30pm onwards is just because I'm popular for one hour in the year.

I'd like to go away for New Year, and one of these years I will do, when flight prices decide not to be through the roof and I win the lottery. Sydney would be good, I'd like to see the fireworks over the harbour bridge, maybe Times Square in New York. Istanbul maybe? I'll decide on that one when I've been and I decide whether I like it or not. But really, I'd settle for sitting on a beach with friends at New Year, not shivering my arse off with about ten blankets and having to endure whatever hellish rammel they've stuck on the BBC to 'entertain' us saddos that can't be bothered to go out.

So this time I've decided that I won't make any resolutions, because basically I never keep them, oh actually, I did keep one once, although it wasn't really a resolution, more of a decision; about ten years ago I promised I would pluck my eyebrows every weekend. I've kept to that one. Basically because if I didn't then lord knows what I'd look like.

No, this year I'm just going to say that 2012 will be about me working towards where I want to be. Hopefully I might fast track myself there if some things in the pipeline work out, but we'll have to see with that. If not, then I will save my arse off and put things in place - because I have decided once and for all that in three years' time, when the evil, evil loan is paid off, I am packing up and moving to the sun for good.

I have asked Santa for one this year - it's probably not going to happen but if anyone can do it, Santa can, right? I have asked him to sort out the tangled mess that is my heart, and hopefully knock some sense into the one that's making it tangled. It would be a Christmas miracle on a scale nearing the first one, but hey, that's what Christmas is about, right? Hope and all that.

So Santa, you lovely, red-suited, bearded dude, come on, I've been a good girl, honest I have ....