Christmas Clean.

In our house there’s weekly clean, neighbour in for a drink clean, party clean and Christmas Clean. Christmas Clean is the M&S of clean, like your grandmother used to do it but with a fitted kitchen and no green velvet tassely thing on the dining room table. Things were polished to last back then; they had lustre and we have easy-clean ever-smeary laminated compressed wood pulp. But not with Christmas Clean. The dead skunk behind the sideboard we’ve been meaning to remove all year, gone. Those tenacious bathroom hairs that could easily escape from Colditz and travel to Spain without capture, gone. Lampshades, well actually even Christmas Clean doesn’t cover them, only ‘OMG I saw my long dead grandma in a dream last night and she mentioned the state of them specifically.’  So it’s Christmas Eve and I’m ramped up to extreme, some might say neurotic, levels of cleanliness. I can spot a breadcrumb at twenty yards. It’s like my vision has been set to micro; I might not see the elephant in the room but I’ll sure as hell notice if it’s brought in specs of jungle dung on its feet. And now just a few hours before the relations arrive. To be honest they’re not the cleanest people in the world, they’re just neighbours in for a drink clean, so they’re unlikely to spot we’re Christmas Clean, but we feel somehow morally uplifted by all the effort. I guess that just means we’re lazy bastards the rest of the year. Sounds about right.