In recent years, we seem to have started measuring the countdown to Christmas in sleeps – “only thirteen more sleeps till Christmas” radio DJs or TV presenters will say, for example. Obviously, when you get to my age you need to add a good 50% to that figure, as I often doze off for ten minutes or so after tea; but I realise that this would only confuse things, and anyway it isn’t really meant as a precise number of sleeps, only as a marker of how many nights (or, if you prefer, how many days) are left before Christmas Day.
I can still remember feeling that nervous, hyped-up excitement going to bed on Christmas Eve, the electric sense of anticipation more traditionally reserved for newlyweds. I can even remember lying there, wide awake and certain I’d never get to sleep… only for the next thing I know to be me waking up! Granted, my brother & I used to wake up VERY early – so it’s not impossible that with thirteen days to go till Christmas our parents would have marked that as “only twelve more sleeps” on the grounds that they’d be unlikely to get any on Christmas Eve.
(I’ve also heard, going off on a tangent for a moment, “better get to sleep so Father Christmas will come” which is surely confusing causation with correlation. But I digress.)
As an adult those sleeps come round very quickly, as the weeks and months (and heaven help us, the years) fly by. I suspect, though, that if I was still a child, and it was still only the twelfth of December, and there were a whole thirteen more sleeps to go before I would finally get a visit from Father Christmas–
I think by now I’d be tired of waiting!
Andrew Curnow's Ramblings 