Why you should avoid Kingston’s Christmas market

Come November and the Christmas fairy throws up all over the Western world with her glitter snowflakes to transform everything with fake embellishments and fill markets with overpriced cheap stocking fillers.

Kingston jumps on the capitalist Christmas bandwagon five weeks prior to the holiday with 50 wooden chalets and A children’s entertainment area with rides being set up in the Ancient Market Place.

Like every year the town centre of Kingston is clotted with Christmas-crazed people who spend their seasonal savings buying overpriced arts, crafts and decorations from stalls that have taken over the pedestrianised streets.

This year the market was set up on November 16 and will continue to occupy the area until December 31. The new and miserable addition to the market this year is Candy Cane Forest, an entertainment area full of rides and competitions dedicated to children. As if dealing with other people’s yappy children at Christmas dinners wasn’t a punishment enough for those who have no interest in adding to the world’s problems.

The experience of the glittering festive cheer wouldn’t be complete with outdoor bars full of steaming mugs of mulled wine that at any other time of the year you wouldn’t even use as toilet cleaner. Once you are done soaking up the overpriced, low quality stall food you can move on to hand-crafted gift ware to fill up the stockings of relatives that you only meet once a year. The ‘unique’ gifts you are bound to overspend on are nothing but misshapen Rudolphs and red lamp shades that won’t last past this season.

The Kingston Christmas market may be stereotypically quaint and cheerful but thank God it isn’t as hyped up as the annual Hyde Park tribute that would make the Grinch dizzy. The stuffy rumbling department stores with stressful shoppers fighting over cashmere cardigans for their mother-in-laws are no better than the markets but the quality of stuff being sold is far superior. The commercialisation of what is supposed to be a religious holiday is appalling and the peer pressure it induces among people to blow their budget creates a seasonal misanthropy.

The embracing of charitable causes you don’t care for and bonding with second cousins you have no interest in isn’t the real reason for the seasonal dismay. The stuff that these Christmas markets sell, preying off the weak who succumb to buying wire jewelry, cinnamon-scented soaps and ugly jumpers is the crux of the matter.