Holiday mishaps to avoid

What you need to know:

  • There are certain things no self-respecting woman should do over the festive period – and falling in love is top of the pile.

I often like to think that one day, at the end of my life on earth, I will have an audience with my Maker. Though I do not want to pre-empt His verdict on whether I will be banished to hell or sent to heaven, I do hope that He allows me a few minutes to plead my case and ask my questions. Given a chance, I would like to ask Him why he came up with the two most notorious things to ever exist – sex and alcohol. Like many others, I have stumbled as a result of one or both of these things.

Every holiday season, I join many mere mortals like myself who try to navigate the treacherous world of merry making and over indulgence in food, booze and bednastics. However, experience has taught me a few things and I think I can use those lessons to help you avoid making some crazy love mistakes this holiday season.

The first lesson is that you need to be cautious about anyone who claims to fall in love with you over the holiday season. Of course, given all the jingling bells, beautiful carols and sunny weather, it is virtually impossible not to fall in real or imaginary love.

Since we spend so much time at parties, it is only natural that we emit serious love and affection signals. All the jingling bells turn our heads into mushy pulp and we fall in love randomly and frequently. The Kenyan diaspora also tilts the love quotient as they come laden with strong currencies, nasal accents, a great sense of fun and slightly improved romantic manners than the locals.

Cut your losses

Put all these together and you have the perfect recipe for love brewed in an Equatorial Christmas pot. Come January and the romance is either scorched by the January heat of brokenness, or simply fades away into the Northern Hemisphere winter.

So it important that we treat these Christmas dalliances as nothing more than holiday flings. If they mature into something great next year, then thank Santa for a job well done. But if it withers in January, cut your losses and run.

The second lesson revolves around love and its cost. Most women see being in a relationship as a call to martyrdom and sainthood. They like to keep the M – money and materialism – words out of relationships. Many women like to view themselves as a cut above the sisters who demand a dime for every pound of flesh that they give to their men.

Our men are great at receiving so they don’t do anything to change the circumstances. Christmas is the one time when every woman can – and should – demand something from her man in return for putting up with his annoying ways all year round.

After all those long football drinks with the boys, women should ask for more than a hug and a kiss. This is the time to demand more than those generic texts that men like to imagine constitute Christmas cards. Yes, they say that giving is from the heart and should never be mandatory but that is just a convenient excuse for those cheapskates who like to take and never give. If he isn’t giving you anything tangible this holiday season then it is time you sent him packing.

Remember these words

There is something about sending off the old year and ushering in the New Year that makes us wanton and careless. Everything about the holidays makes us want to shed off our phobias, our guard and self-restraint but most importantly, our sense of caution. We may have been good all year round but come December, words like ‘precaution’ and ‘contraception’ become alien.

We drop all our emotional and physical shackles as soon as Boney M starts playing on high rotation on radio. A random population survey will indicate that quite a number of us are, or have, August and September babies. If you do your biological calculations, it is fairly easy to figure out that conception happened around the holidays.

To save yourself the headache and dilemmas that come with unplanned pregnancies, I think all aspiring pleasure seekers should find a way to access some protection as soon as it is needed.

So until our Maker tells us why He threw in so much booze and sex into the Christmas season, we will have to manage our pleasures wisely so that they do not leave us scarred for eternity.