December is a deceptive month where danger lurks in unsuspected quarters – like the shopping mall, the school hall and the hearth at home.

We’ve all seen the pictures of Bicester Village on Black Friday when so many shoppers came to snap up Christmas bargains that the place became gridlocked. Cars could not get in or out for hours.

Elsewhere in the country consumers fought each other tooth and nail to bag a bargain and some even ended up in hospital. This isn’t so much the season of good cheer but good grief.

Oxford Mail:

Crowded Bicester Village on Black Friday

I got caught up in this orgy when I visited Asda in Wheatley to buy just one large tub of Ben and Jerry’s Chocolate Fudge ice cream reduced from £5 to £2.50. The wait at the checkout counter was 45 minutes. I felt like a rat in a psychological experiment to find out how much stress would break the rat down and turn it into a savage animal – all over a tub of ice cream!

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Roasting chestnuts on an open fire can cause problems, especially over Christmas for the over-60s, when “the spark” has died out and mum and dad are just going through the motions.

This time of year can be dangerous to marriage and the number of people over 60 getting divorced has risen by three quarters in just 20 years. This is the age of the “silver splitters”.

Record numbers of retired people with pensions and adult children head for their legal advisers over and after Christmas, according to the family section of the Oxford firm of solicitors, Hedges Law. Trade is so brisk they offer a list of five tips to guide “silver splitters” through their divorces.

Lawyer Kate Jones from Hedges said some of the stories were heart-rending: “A couple divorced in their late 60s and the husband left to live in Thailand where he met and married a much younger Thai woman. They had a son and returned to live in the UK.

“The new wife had a gambling and alcohol addiction which became out of control. Meanwhile the husband was diagnosed with a highly aggressive cancer and given weeks to live.

“Fearful of the fate of his son in the hands of the heavy drinking and financially irresponsible mother, the husband drove through the night with his son to the home of his adult daughter from his first marriage.

“The first thing next morning she instructed us to go to court for a residence order so that the boy could live with her. The father died later that day and the son remained in the care of his older half-sister.”

December is also the month of the nativity play in the school hall. What could possibly be dangerous about that? I went to my first little such innocent event 22 years ago and came face to face with the danger.

WC Fields said never act with children and dogs. Wheatley Primary School set out to prove him wrong. Their nativity play featured 150 children and one dog. WC Fields was right. Their nativity play was unrepeatable, irrepressible and unrivalled.

Mary and Joseph were the centre of attention until the dog started to wag its tail. Dogs know instinctively how to upstage humans. The more the kids tried to calm the dog down, the more animated it became.

But the real rogue animal in the pack at this nativity play was an innocent looking five-year-old shepherd. He started using the spotlights to make spider shadows with his hands as soon as he came on stage. This occupied him during Joseph and Mary’s journey to Bethlehem and their search for a bed.

The birth of Jesus turned into a spine-tingling moment when the shepherd began to tickle the shoulders of the child next to him and to use his fingers like spider legs to walk all over the child’s hair, eyes, nose and mouth and then jump down his stomach.

His neighbour-victim didn’t flinch.

Each shepherd wore on his head a tea towel kept in place with a rope. The little shepherd-spiderman used both the rope and the towel to conjure up a variety of disguises.

While the rest of the cast sang Away In A Manger, he was away in his tea towel creating new characters: King Tutankhamun, Mata Hari and Buster Keaton.

This wasn’t deliberate upstaging. No one could keep it up for such a long time on purpose. There wasn’t any hint of embarrassment, no fear of the audience… he wasn’t even aware of the audience.

This little shepherd was just in a world of his own where Christmas had come early and his gift was a tea towel that he could turn into 1001 magic moments. It was also a gift to the audience. His parents were mortified.

However, on the positive side, that was the moment I realised my son was going to become a star… one way or another.

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