Even though it's still two days away from Christmas, Ruby has decided to let us have a present early, gracing us with another 15 minutes of embarrassing cringe.
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She establishes her festive scene, showing that her windows are as fogged with condensation as her brain, and the gifted flowers on her windowsill wilt away just as fast as her career prospects.
"Hallo, it's Roobee, and tyooday oiy'm gyowing tyoo bee dyooing some...Victorian Christmas traditional...things," she says with an unusually glum tone, having clearly put a lot of thought and effort into this video.
This lack of effort shows no signs of stopping as Ruby proclaims that "the Victorians are credited with creating the modern Christmas" without offering any further details.
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Ruby has her own traditions, though, which include:
- Sitting in filth and squalor.
- Starting fires.
- Pretending to read.
She ticks all boxes at once as she scoots around in her pyjamas on the disgusting ash-covered hearth in one of her numerous, equally squalid living rooms, starts a fire burning and flicks through a book she'll never read a chapter of, let alone finish.
Ruby starts on a manic, wide-eyed, hand-waving ramble about how the Victorian Christmas was all centred around gathering by the fireplace and reading ghost stories (or "GO-sturries!", as Ruby calls them).
The Victorian practice of reading ghost stories isn't something that has really made the transition to modern Christmas and is no longer a widespread festive tradition, so whatever establishing point she was trying to set up is already abandoned entirely with her first example.
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Evidently her parents restricted her usual arson attempts to her bedroom, as she moans that the fire in this room is gas, so it's not traditional.
To get into the spooky spirit of Christmas ghost stories, Ruby is reading...a locked room mystery collection.
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"These aren't GO-sturries, but it's the closest thing I had in my coll-ack-shun," Ruby says.
Reminder: Ruby owns A Christmas Carol. She claims to have read it at least three times, including in October. She was a panel guest on a live Q&A after a virtual performance of A Christmas Carol literally the day she filmed this. Another reminder: A Christmas Carol contains no less than three ghosts.
But I know what you're thinking - it's not really a
scary story, is it? You're right. If only there were a way for Ruby to buy or borrow a spooky Victorian ghost book from a place that she visits often, and then she could read it for this video...
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But since nobody has created such businesses yet, I guess she just had to make do with a unrelated book of murder mysteries.
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Sorry, I think my internet is playing up, I don't know how those unrelated images got attached.
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Ruby complains about how weird it feels to be reading scary ghosts stories at Christmas and not Halloween, even though she's not reading scary ghost stories and doesn't read them on Halloween either.
"BUT...it's good," she says unconvincingly. "And I do like this COLLACK-SHUN."
M.R. James was
right there, Ruby.
Sure, a lot of his work was published in the Edwardian period, but most was written and published in the Victorian era. His stories are also a rare example of Victorian-era ghost tales which have endured as a rare Christmas ghost story tradition to this day, which would've tied into the setup you failed to pay off.
The BBC even did a series of adaptations for Christmas over the years. There's even a new adaptation of The Mezzotint due to air on Christmas Eve this year. Hell, the guy who edited the locked room mystery book in your very hand also assembled collections of James's stories. I guess that all would've required a sliver of thought, effort and preparation on your part, though, which we know is never an option.
Ruby practically hurls the book into the trash as she mentions that she's just about to tune in to the live reading of A Christmas Carol.
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"This it a prime example of a GYO-sturry which was read aloud around Christmas time. Of course, in A Christmas Carol, Scrooge is visited by three GHOSTS, and so it VERY MUCH incorporates those traditional stories of Christmas, but we also seeee [scrunches fist] MODERN CHRISTMAS STORIES enveloped within this tyoo."
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I listened to this several times and it never made any more sense than it did the first time. What babbling fucking nonsense. Reminder: Ruby is in her third year of an English Lit degree.
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Ruby sits down to watch the performance in another living room.
She huddles for warmth under several layers with a coat draped over her, while sat next to an open window in the middle of winter.
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A true genius at work.
She rambles more nonsense about Charles Dickens being a public performer, but says nothing of merit or value and never approaches a point.
She does her Q&A guest appearance (The Dickens Museum never advertised its guests by name, so some poor bastards sat through the performance and were then assaulted by "HALLO, IT'S ROOBEE!" in return for their £15 fee), but she shows no footage of any of this. If her comments in this video about the story and Dickens are anything to gauge her contribution to the panel by, it was an unmitigated disaster.
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Having completely given up on that book she was pretending to read, which had nothing to do with Christmas, Ruby has moved on to writing more Christmas cards. Ruby knows less than a handful of people and has already written 7.2 billion Christmas cards this year, but what's another dead tree in a barren forest?
She says she's already written this person a card, but she's going to write another, because harassment is for life, not just for Christmas. It's her old English teacher, and suddenly all her uni lecturers who were counting down the seconds until Ruby fucks off out of their life all just had simultaneous panic attacks.
Live footage of the Exeter University teacher's lounge:
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Ruby rambles about how modern Christmas cards are too related to Christmas and don't have enough weird, unrelated shit thrown in, which explains her approach to this video.
She claims that very few early Christmas cards had traditionally Christmas-themed imagery.
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After showing one example, she then struggles to find any more to prove her point, and uses the first Christmas card ever sent as a chief example of this.
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Floral decoration. Festive cheer. Families gathered to enjoy food and drink. Vaguely biblical imagery.
Nah, nothing like a traditional Christmas card, eh, Ruby?
Ruby moans that she couldn't find out who coloured the first Christmas card. She wasted her Dickens lecturer's time asking them, because harassing her tutors with endless emails coaxing them into offering her essay ideas wasn't enough, she has to go off-book and bother them with completely irrelevant bullshit, too.
Her lecturer posited that someone probably would've hired a woman to do the colouring, probably telling Ruby the most obvious intuited conclusion to get Ruby to leave them alone. Ruby then treats this as a confirmed fact and goes off on a tangent about how this naturally shows that it's always women doing all the work. I mean, sure - it was the Victorian era. And things haven't changed nearly as much as they should in terms of gender equality even now.
But even a cursory bit of Googling pins down the person credited with the colouring of that first Christmas card to a professional artist/colourer by the name of William Mason. He could've taken the credit for the work of someone else, that's entirely possible. But Ruby said she looked for the details of who coloured it and came up completely empty - not even a name.
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She goes on about how colour printing wasn't a thing, so she says she's made a black and white Christmas card and will colour it in. She then holds up her Christmas card components - two of which are printed in full colour.
"Christmas puddings were VERY COMMON on a Christmas card," she chirps smugly, even though she was just saying that most cards featured weird images unrelated to Christmas.
As she's droning on with poorly-researched drivel, we hear pained wailing in the background. It seems the Victorian spectres that haunt her gloomy home just want Ruby to shut the fuck up with this nonsense already. Ruby does not record a second take.
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Ruby posts a lip-service disclaimer to sternly remind us not to over-romanticise and simplify Victorian history in this, the latest of numerous videos in which she over-romanticises and simplifies Victorian history.
She drones on about plum puddings for what feels like most of my adult life and never once approaches any kind of a point. Is this
my Scroogian Christmas torment? Am I being tortured by the ghost of YouTube present? It sure feels like it.
After rambling about Christmas puddings for hours, she says, "Question: Do you actually
like Christmas pudding? Because I think it's really disgusting."
"I think it's more a tradition thing than people ACTUALLY like it," she proclaims. Because if your tastes differ from Ruby's, you're just lying to yourself.
She starts lisping heavily, and like the research for this video, she gives up colouring her card partway through and calls it a day.
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She mentions that traditionally, Christmas card messages were very basic and just had a sparse, festive greeting like "Happy Christmas".
So she writes an absolute fucking essay in hers.
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What was the name of this video again?
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I thought so. Just checking.
"I'm actually getting my byoostuh jab in an hour," she says.
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To be eligible for a vaccine booster, you have to have had the first two, Ruby.
For the next tradition, Ruby says she's going to make a handmade Frankenstein-themed bookmark for her mother, because Victorian gifts were traditionally handmade. And this isn't at all just a flimsy means of turning some bullshit she was going to do anyway into content padding for an unrelated video.
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(Pictured: Ruby "I don't
dyoo art" "Granger" doing art with her art supplies.)
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It looks like crap, and she's chosen a picture of Frankenstein's monster that looks more like John Snow with a big forehead.
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Ruby rambles more barely-researched crap, this time about Father Christmas.
She's baffled at the idea that people used to leave offerings for Father Christmas instead of just getting things for free, even though this is
still a thing.
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The concept of giving things away almost breaks Ruby's greed-driven brain, but she powers through and leaves her poorly-made bookmarks on the Christmas tree:
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(You and me both, weird ornament.)
She says ACTUALLY, she's going to take them down off the tree until Christmas morning so she won't spoil the surprise. The best way to not spoil anything for anyone is to just throw your children's art project away and give your mum the gift of moving the fuck out.
Ruby says she's going to try out a Victorian gift-wrapping "hack" for wrapping handkerchiefs. She puts on her "Did you know...?" voice and drones some more about some poorly-researched crap, but at this point, as soon as she slips into her pompous "educational" cadence, it just became white noise to me.
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"I should have ironed this, I'm sorry," she says, holding up a handkerchief. "If it were an actual gift, I would have!"
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Ruby has never ironed a single thing in her life. Clothes she wears. Clothes she advertises. Clothes she shows in professional videos. Clothes she sells on Depop. All crinkled and crease as fuck.
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She struggles to figure out how to wrap the handkerchief and has to Google it again. She does, only to reveal that this isn't a Victorian thing at all, but an Edwardian technique. She also discovers that she didn't pay attention to the initial instructions and used thick wrapping paper instead of tissue paper, like she was supposed to.
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"pape"
She fails to find any "tissue pape" and just uses the thick wrapping paper instead.
"I'm sorry, this is such a short video," she says, even though this video is 15 painfully long minutes of pointless drivel.
As her failures in this video start to mount up, Ruby starts having a mental crisis.
"I was hoping for this video to be more...formally done like the other Victorian videos I've done*, but I left it too late and so close to Christmas and...unfortunately I don't really have the time to put together a really elaborate video. And also--I guess I COULD, if I prioritised that, but...it's Christmas, and the most important thing at Christmas is being with your family. And I don't want to...NEGLACKT THAT for...making a video..."
(*They weren't.)
And suddenly, like a Christmas miracle, Ruby has convinced herself that this half-assed--nay,
quarter-assed video, full of ineptitude, irrelevant bullshit and terrible research, is good enough. Because spending time with family at Christmas, as opposed to every single other week, is more important than putting any kind of effort into the creative endeavour that comprises your primary source of income.
There were other options, Ruby. You could have just not bothered. Or you could have just planned ahead and been better organised. But it's not like you sell stationary to help with that kind of thing.
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"You're probably thinking why did I even included this segment of the video, because that did not work AT ALL," she says, holding up her wrapping failure. Don't worry, Ruby. We're thinking that about
every segment.
"But the Victorians had so many cool ways to wrap presents!" she yells excitedly. She shows none of those, though, and abruptly cuts to her outro.
After threatening us with the prospect of yet another morning routine on Christmas, Ruby finally puts an end to this, her most woefully inept video in a long time. And that's saying something.