🕯 Yuletide & Festive Loneliness 🥂 · Society of Ordinary Gentlemen

Rene Belhume

Dec '25 • Mental/Physical Well Being 🥊

🕯 Yuletide & Festive Loneliness 🥂

Gentlemen, Dames

As the tinsel goes up, so too — one observes — does the general sense of existential despair.

It’s quite all right to acknowledge this. We all feel it.

December, for all its glitter and glühwein, is a treacherous month for the solitary man.

The shops overflow with couples in matching knitwear.

Invitations abound, yet somehow all lead to events titled “Merry and Married.”

Even the wine begins to taste smug — much like those Christmas cards, plastered with faux-happy family photos and a Labrador in antlers.

And to compound the matter — as if the universe were actively conspiring — His Grace’s football (“soccer”) team has entered into what can only be described as a tactical winter hibernation, languishing at the wrong end of the Premier League, with a festive fixture list that promises further psychological ruin.

It is, one might say, a perilous time for morale.

So let it be known: Christmas is not, in fact, the most wonderful time of the year.

For many of us, it is a brutal reminder that one is not in Saint‑Tropez, not in love, and not — despite heroic efforts — anywhere near the top four.

So what is a gentleman to do?

He is to rally.

He is to send for cigars.

He is to check on his comrades.

He is to pour a generous port and raise it — not to sentiment, but to sovereignty.

The Society of Ordinary Gentlemen should hold the line this season, and I encourage us all to connect more. I shall be available for chats, dispatches, and perhaps a festive conference call — accompanied by an iced bottle of Veuve Clicquot from my Spanish hacienda, where I shall be restoring myself, most likely by the pool.

This is our Dunkirk.

So if you see a fellow member adrift this December — do not let him drift. Send a message. Extend a hand.

After all, a gentleman does not let another gentleman go mad alone in December.

Rene

73 comments