It’s that time of year again that everyone gets excited, drinks too much, loves family, drinks a bit more and hates family. The reason I talk about Christmas, I’m sure you’ve already guessed, is that I have been wrapping presents. It is easily my least favourite part of the whole experience as I find it so very tedious. I have obvious reservations about Christmas, the commercialisation has spread like rabies and it can create the same rabid affect on people, but it is also the same people who wince when they see shop decorations in September. People still seem to have retained a semblance of decency in this regard despite the best efforts of those trying to sell joy.
What is it then that makes people enjoy Christmas so much, it can’t just be the buying and selling of presents, despite best efforts our happiness isn’t programmed into the strength of the economy and has nothing to do with GDP. And despite all my reservations I must confess that after the horrors of realising I have to buy presents and think, I actually quite enjoy it, there’s something satisfying realising you’ve had a good idea. Perhaps then it comes back to the initial idea in the very first sentence. The obvious statement to make is that Christmas brings people together, and while that is cheesy and not entirely accurate with it’s disgustingly positive connotations, there is still some truth in it. It may be that in bringing people together and creating an environment in which people can eat, drink and be merry, it allows them to forget the drudgery of their existence for a few days. The highs and lows of life and all the drama that that entails, loving and then hating family, is always something us sensation hooked humans thrive on, evidenced surely by the spike in domestic violence over the period.
Yet we keep on coming back. Year after year we get excited for Christmas, or at least in my little middle class bubble everyone I know does. I suspect it is also an incredibly stressful period for millions of people out there as they take on the new debt that’ll take them until the following Christmas to pay off or spend it without a loved one for the first time. Does that make me enjoy my Christmas any less, and would it make me a bad person if I didn’t let it. It would certainly take a selfish martyr to tell me so. In which case we embrace the bubble we live in. Eat, drink, fuck and fight just as we did last year, and just as we’ll do for a thousand to come.
Observations and Misunderstandings 