I don’t like Christmas (Bah, humbug etc.), in a way that, admittedly, has become a rather self-indulgent and juvenile yearly exercise in the killing of other people’s joy. The fact is that most people, it seems, are capable of finding fun in something I simply can’t. This one, I’m afraid, is going to be even rantier than usual. I apologise for nothing. I am, for today, Scrooge McGrumpus. You have been warned.
I just can’t see the fun the in it. The tinsel is tacky, the shops are all rammed. Everything around Christmas seems to acquire a thin plastic sheen of upbeat salesmanship. You are expected to enjoy yourself, and I’m afraid that this species of enforced jollity, whereby everyone is expected to voluntarily pretend that the world’s a great big happy funhouse, is the one thing guaranteed to prevent me from enjoying anything. But I’m not a lost cause here – far from it. I want to find something about Christmas that I can genuinely like, that I can engage with little enough reservation to actually enjoy myself. It’s just hugely difficult – so, on with the inevitable list of hate (this is, I believe, at least 80% of the reason for the existence of blogs, after all).
For a start, I’m not a Christian, so for me this is just some midwinter festival – which would be fine were it not for the ‘traditions’ that get in the way of it just being a big party. I hate the tackiness of the decorations (actually, where I live they’re not that bad, but I remember small-town decorations, and everything else is polluted by that memory), especially in and around people’s homes. If you really liked it looking like that, you’d have decorated it that way in the first place. I’m not five any more – shiny things do not impress me. I hate the idiocy of Christmas trees, which was a daft idea when (and, let’s be honest, if) the pagans did it, and was made even dafter when it was inexplicably linked to Christmas by the 16th century Germans. I don’t like the fact that we’re obliged to buy things for people when they’re at their most expensive, and all at once, and when we have little idea about what to buy them – the net result of this situation being that everyone gets expensive rubbish. I’d prefer to buy things for people when I see something they’d like (which I do try to do, by the way). I also hate Christmas cards. They’re utterly pointless, about the most insincere thing to ever to exist outside of politics, and a huge waste of resources. I hate Christmas films – they’re sentimental rubbish. I hate Christmas songs – their sentimental rubbish as well. The only worthwhile Christmas tune I can think of is ‘Fairytale of New York’ by The Pogues – which is hardly a celebration of the season. Having said that, I do like ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’, which is a Christmas movie, and this brings us neatly to what I’d like to talk about.
‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ is a great movie, but it’s a fairytale. And not just because it has an angel in it. The idea of brotherhood and community that is explored in ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ has never existed, even in 1940’s small-town America. It’s also, (and not co-incidentally), a very left-wing film. If you haven’t seen it, do. It’s really uplifting. It’s what I’d like Christmas to be. But Christmas isn’t like that.
The ideal Christmas is some kind of synthesis between Charles Dickens definition of Christmas spirit (from which, in Britain at least, we also take the primary aesthetic), and 1940’s American moral mythology. From its Christian heritage we get ideas regarding reward for the virtuous, peace and goodwill to all men. All very good and wholesome, and some of this still goes on, but is practiced only in the tiniest way by a hard-core fraternity of faithful and generally super-annuated true-believers. They are a dying breed. I’d like to see more of the charitable works (who could argue with that?), and if you are going to have a festival of peace, I’m up for that too. Lets all do some voluntary work for Amnesty for Christmas. But nobody does.
What we have now is all the trimmings designed to conjure this, but none of the virtuous intent. It’s the dream of a child – all glitz and romance, but lacking substance. Our rituals and spells are summoning an empty vessel. Carol singers demand money with musical menaces, singing praises to the birth of a messiah they don’t believe in, or even know very much about. Children focus utterly on avaricious selfishness. The rest of us, in accordance with a tradition we have very little understanding of, stuff ourselves to groaning capacity with food so rich that we are expected to feel sick for hours. Then we watch television and eat again. By the end of the day you can almost always guarantee that you’ve had a row with somebody, and everybody wonders why they’re not enjoying themselves as much as their supposed to. So you get pissed instead. People build up the day in their minds, decorate their houses for little reason at all, spend hundred of pounds and then fail to enjoy themselves. It’s disgusting, it’s awful, it’s a destructive pattern, and I want no part of it.
Christmas is for children, though, right? Well, it’s true that most of us as children were fascinated by the sparking lights, enchanted by the myths and stories, and excited at the prospect of presents. It’s easy to sell an idea to a child, and the constant reinforcements from films and television make it real enough. Of course, the older you get, the more these memories blur into one huge collage of moments, as much fantasy as actuality. Quite a lot of people in England vividly remember it snowing at Christmas, for example, but if you’re under forty, it’s extremely unlikely that you’ve ever seen a white Christmas unless you were on holiday. If you have children of your own, or you are part of a family with a lot of young children, you might still be able to get some pleasure through the enjoyment they are having. Yet it can’t be all about children. People of all ages seem to get enthusiastic about Christmas, and many of the traditions involved are quite complex and very adult. Almost everything outside of the presents and glitter is a complete mystery to children, and they’d never even notice if it was gone. Even if the primary focus for Christmas were children, that’s no reason for us to continue with the rest of it.
Yet there may be a reason for all the nonsense. Positive aspects to seemingly mindless nostalgia. A friend explained this to me the other day. It’s not appropriate to repeat any of the specific reasons that my friend brought up here, I feel. Suffice to say that the claim was two-fold – that the process of joining in with Christmas helped to evoke memories of happier times spent before, and gives a context in which new happy memories can be framed, and then remembered. Secondly, joining in with an act that is traditional within your country, regardless of its inherent ridiculousness (and, perhaps, because of it) helps you to connect to those around you, making you feel part of something greater –connecting you to both your current community, and the history you all share.
Let’s deal with these in reverse order. Connecting to any notion of the past that you don’t understand and appreciate is nonsensical. If you are getting any sense of connection to history, it’s a false chimera of a thing. I say this because little of what we do actually has any historical quality to it at all. Turkeys didn’t even exist in England until the 18th century. Most of the seemingly traditional elements of Christmas were established very, very recently indeed, often under the reign of Queen Victoria. They then spread to the US, who popularised this ‘traditional’ Christmas into a world-wide phenomenon with their usual capitalist gusto. Santa, the jolly old fellow with a big white beard and red trousers was likely invented by an American illustrator called Thomas Nast in the late nineteenth century – by which time, people were already complaining that it was largely a commercial enterprise. It was then constantly re-interpreted and represented throughout the early twentieth century from a kaleidoscopic number of sources to produce a product you might very well call the ‘modern Christmas’ some time in the mid twentieth century.
You can’t connect to the past beyond – at most – a couple of generations unless you know your traditions. If, like me, you’re a Brit, you should probably go out and get yourself a wild boar and some cuttings from bushes, hang them up, then beat yourself into unconsciousness for being a filthy ignorant pagan. Fantasy is of no use – you might as well try to connect to the traditions of Middle-Earth.
As for joining in with mass culture and feeling like you belong, that’s more possible. Group activities do make us feel like we belong, but in the case of Christmas, what we do is not collective. Truly behaving like a group means interaction – group declarations and such. It’s an activity that you become involved with. Church services are a good example of this, but if you don’t believe, what are you doing there? Christmas, though, is now essentially passive. We purchase our way into an inauthentic group experience, taking no active part in it. Often, we barely even see anyone outside of our own families. Simply because we all do the same thing in isolation does not imply a collective experience. Rather, it is a series of particular, isolated, similar experiences. It’s a sad echo of community. Simply placing a tree into the corner of your room just like everyone else does cannot connect you to everyone else any more than it connects you to the union of foresters.
But the first point holds more promise. Recreating the surroundings you were in for an experience you enjoyed long ago will help to crystallise it in your brain. Making time to be with your family can be important and rewarding (depending on your family, of course), and adhering to certain particular traditions can certainly do this. Future experiences can also be placed into this context, and thus can the passage of time be marked, and good times enjoyed over and again. Still, this only works if you embrace a sense of control over you’re the traditions you observe. You can’t have a Victorian Christmas – you’re not a Victorian. You can’t have the Christmases of your childhood – you’re not a child. You have to embrace the change, not fight it.
We must be careful not to fall into a nostalgic desire for re-creation. You need to make new memories, and have new experiences. Trying to live out a fantasy over and again is of no use, even within the context of a personalised series of specific traditions. Every time anything is done, it is necessarily different. Even if everything else does not change (and that’s nearly impossible in itself), you will have changed.
There’s a lesson here to be learned from movies – good versus bad sequels. Sometimes it’s fun to watch the same film again, but no matter how good it is, if you watch it over and over again, it will become stale and diminished. It’s much, much better to watch a good sequel. Take the themes and explore them again, but make it new, give it a different story. It’s also no good trying to do a re-make – they are almost always inferior to the original. Good re-makes explore the same themes in different contexts – they don’t just try to remake the film shot-for shot, and thereby resemble good sequels better than bad ones. Don’t try to re-create or exploit simply for the sake of nostalgia. It will always be an inferior experience to the rose-tinted definitions of the original. If you do any of these things, you are setting yourself up for a fall, and are likely to create something about as worthwhile as Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’ (for those who haven’t seen this travesty – just don’t; seriously, just don’t). It’ll ruin what came before. And there’s another danger. Making something seem stale and repetitive means that you run the danger of coming to define the formerly good experience by the latterly dingy ones. Also, if you try to make a good sequel, it doesn’t matter if it’s not quite as good as the original – as long as it’s a good experience in its own right. You don’t expect it to have to be as good or better, just thematically connected, and good in and of itself. It helps you to measure each experience on its own merits.
So here’s the method – take the themes you like, the things that interest or please you, and run. Take all the good bits and throw the rest away. Be savage, and be inventive.
We can gain something massively positive from this – we can evoke any ideas we want. We are not limited to what we inherit. It is the duty of each of us to celebrate what we want, rather than what we’re told, in full knowledge of what we’re doing. And change is fundamental to this process. There is no value to be had in merely re-creating – everything will become refined into hollow blandness by degrees with every iteration.
Reinvent the winter festival – we can even keep the name ‘Christmas’ if we want – but do something for a reason. Stop being passive and accepting – if you are going to do something, putting your hard-earned money, your time, your will and your effort into it, then make sure that such a huge investment is made into something that you really want. It’s what it means to be human, not just some beast dumbly repeating the training it’s been given – when you come to understand something, you can take what you want from it, throw the rest aside and then re-create.
So what could we do? We could have public festivals – that’d be good. We could all take three weeks off and do some voluntary work. That’d really bring the community together. We could even celebrate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (signed 10th December 1948) – how’s that for peace on earth and goodwill to all men? I like those themes, but you get to pick your own. Maybe you’d like to concentrate on good, solid family time. Why not go on holiday together instead of hanging around your house? If you see it as a party, go to (or, even better, organise) a huge celebration with wall-to-wall hedonism and violent happiness. It is time to take charge of our traditions. They are ours, after all.