A new dawn, a New Year

So 2006 is upon, indeed already washing over us as it is now the 3rd of January. This is probably going to be a grumpy post, but then my grumpiness breeds criticism, and there wouldn't be much point in a blog if it just said "this and that are good and ok".
Mainly I'm annoyed because I spent 9 hours at Sainsbury's today, working on a bank holiday after also working on New Year's day. Sainsbury's, it became evident, was the only place in Rustington open, when the entire village and its dog started queuing up at one of the 20 tills open at 3pm. I've only been working there for two weeks over Christmas and I've had enough - thank God I only have one more shift to do on wednesday. I just lost my will to be cheery and overly polite when, at 5:55pm, 5 minutes before closing, the announcement came over for people to come and buy because there was no time left to shop, and I looked down the end of my checkout and saw 5 or 6 people with not just a few bits of shopping queuing up. When the second or third customer came through, and said to me "You're closing early tonight", it took all my strength not to retort 'You should be thankful we're open at all at 6pm on a Bank Holiday, you stupid, old, ungrateful bint'.

Anyway, it's because I'm tired - staying up til this hour (1am ish) and having to get up at 9:30 and 8:30 respectively. Tomorrow I've got no such commitment, except for having to write a literature essay...oh.
Still, the initial part of 2006 was great - at a pub for New Year's Eve with friends from college and - bizarrely - my parents who happened to be there with their friends. I don't remember 3 and a half hour worth of drinking, nor why it took me two hours to walk home. Still, I enjoyed New Year's celebrations as I predicted I would in my previous post; much more than Christmas Day.
I ranted then about consumerism, and today we were selling chocolate eggs. Christmas Day, with 3 months of expectation behind it, was only 8 DAYS ago and now it's all about Easter eggs! Admittedly, the big ones are not on sale yet, but all the mini-eggs and truffle eggs and extra eggs that rake in the money for Cadbury's and Nestle etc are out in force already. You can see how very easily, and very quickly, two religious based holidays have become distorted and twisted into universal celebrations of material goods and chocolate, with preceeding sagas, months long, of advertising putting out the message of nothing at all, except to make people not think about what the adverts are asking them to do, and just doing it. Certainly, no one is thinking of the reasons why these dates in December and April are noteworthy in the first place - indeed, I put April as a month because even now, as I criticise, I don't know the exact dates that are important when it comes to Easter.

That said, I LOVE Creme Eggs and I will be buying them from time to time in the next 4 months or so while they're on sale.