For a few years, i have felt uncomfortable about Christmas. On the one hand, I like the whole seasonal goodwill, cheeriness and decorations, nice glass of mulled wine thank you very much part, and I like the giving and receiving of presents, within reason. But I dislike the commercialism and superficiality of the whole exercise, the hijacking of the festival by Big Business and the have-it-all culture. Now that I have got over my teenage resentment at being obliged to spend time with my family, I also like getting together with the people who are important to me, who live far away so that I don’t see them very often and they miss out on Bernard growing up thing[1]. But I’m not a Christian, I don’t believe in God or Jesus, and therefore I don’t feel comfortable celebrating a Christian festival.
Now that I have responsibility for teaching someone else why we all eat ourselves sick and overspend on presents that usually seem far more thrilling to the giver than the recipient, I no longer feel that it’s okay to justify all the excess by saying, that’s okay, it’s more of a cultural celebration than a religious one. Actually, that doesn’t make it any better at all.
So I was doing a bit of research into how to pick out the positive elements of the festival without feeling like a complete hypocrite, and started reading about pagan festivals, and came to the useful piece of advice: decide what the season means to you and your family, then decide how you want to celebrate.
The first thing I want is to stop calling it Christmas. Every time I use the word, it sounds wrong. The winter solstice celebrations focus very much on the return of the sun, the change of the year from getting darker to getting lighter; lighting candles, watching the dawn, and eating lots of eggs, apparently. This sounds like a good start.
Accepting that there is no getting away from the presents culture, we just have to bite the bullet and start giving things that feel right. An ex-boyfriend’s mother used to organise christmas wishlists in so rigid a fashion that I felt it sucked all the spontaneity of giving out of the whole thing, but in fact I never ended up with yellow spotty socks or two copies of The Gruffalo, at least from that side of the family. So maybe it isn’t such a bad idea after all. Perhaps there are some family groups where we can do a Secret Santa. Perhaps we can make gingerbread biscuits and peppermint creams for the old dears.
I wish I had time to reflect on all of this and work out where I stand and what I want to do, but there is never a moment of quiet.
- yes, I assume that everyone in my family takes as much joy in the whole Bernard growing up thing as I do [↩]