Dialogue: Green credibility took a pasting

There's something a little evil about people in these pre-Christmas hours.

Nobody much wants to rise to or above the tension of the occasion. Quite the reverse.

People want to add to it. They want to add a little fury. They want to be seen adding to it, too.

They are good at that bit. They can be seen all over the place, and in the most unlikely places. Even people who are paid to do otherwise can make angry little scenes.

Here are some scenes as Christmas draws near: a thin, pretty, mean-eyed waitress in a crowded, road-side Titirangi cafe shrieking, "Hey, hey, your eftpos card has been declined. It's been declined," across the room at some poor slob whose bank account (as we all now knew) didn't quite rise to a latte.

Another scene: at another cafe, further north, a pleasant, well-spoken, blond woman was snarling down the telephone at one of her children even as she was serving us.

"Oh, get your father to take you," she snapped into the phone, even as she stirred our drinks. "Get him to take you."

She walked past our table later, after she had hung up the phone. She looked at us for a minute. "Never have kids," she said to us as she strode outside, a little too theatrically.

Another scene (although not, perhaps, a service-industry one): a young family man at a party narrowing his mean little eyes and hissing, "Don't tell me about it. I couldn't give a damn."

He gave this response when alerted by other partygoers to the party-wide plan to set up two partygoers by the end of the night.

This family man was so perfectly infused with loathing for the matchmaking plans that he began spitting beer at the proponent of them, somehow intent on literally raining on the parade.

He was so awful about it that those people who were within earshot decided, without discussion, to drop the whole matchmaking idea and to never refer to it again.

Later on in the evening, the family man's wife wandered up to the group. "Marriage isn't all that it's cracked up to be," she said.

She was grabbing people's arms by this point, to get their attention. "Marriage isn't all that it's cracked up to be."

In fact, it is Christmas that isn't all it is cracked up to be. Of course, we knew that. I just wonder why we are not quite able to stop it.

I wonder what it is like to be able to push past cynicism at this time of year, to be able to pretend that this hot, rotten and hostile time of year is not happening to you, or even to care enough to pretend.

I stood in the dire kiln that is Takapuna Mall last week, trying, again, to work out what the hell we were all doing there.

I wondered why, again, that Christmas, of all habits, is the one that cannot be broken.

I could only conclude that we like it - the heat, the open hostilities, the pushing and shoving in queues, the lack of professionalism and courtesies, the blowing of all your savings on presents for people you don't even visit the rest of the year, the food in crowded, airless food courts, the poor, stupid people who stand behind shop counters wearing their Santa caps.

And then there are the insane office parties with their whores and bears and tigers and their terrible, dumb accidents.

There's something splendidly masochistic about it. We all know that, but it's gathering pace.