Tacky. But that’s okay. Photo: James Coleman.
I’m never sure whether the people who moan about Christmas actually mean it or if they’re just being edgy. If it’s the latter I’d like to prick it here. You can’t be edgy and cliched. If it’s more popular to hate Mariah Carey than it is to enjoy her, you’re not contrarian. You’ve merely replaced one ritual for another.
So, let’s say you mean it. You loathe the Christmas trappings and trimmings. You detest the mawkish carols. The stupid gifts as offensive in their ignorance as they are in their form. The reminder, in the form of uncles and aunts, that the stork delivered you to the wrong doorstep all those years ago and there’s an exquisite lunch in a Scandinavian castle that you were meant to be at instead. The cheapness of it all that can be popped like a bauble in a vice (I know because I’ve done this, and it is more satisfying than screaming in an elevator).
Or perhaps it’s the suspect religiousness of Christmas that makes you bristle, like a good atheist when someone says ‘blessing’.
It’s to you I make my pitch.
The first thing I would dismiss is the hand-wringing over whether Christmas is religious or not.
The writer Christopher Hitchens called this question a ‘culture war’, and he’s right, but like many culture wars, both partisans are slightly right and mostly need to shut up.
Yes, it’s got Christ in the name. Yes, it was an appropriated pagan festival. Yes, the Puritans hated it. Many of their modern-day equivalents still do. The fact is, it is religious because that’s a big part of its tradition. It’s equally not a religious holiday to most, in the same way Canberra Day isn’t about celebrating Canberra. It’s about being on the beach in a different state, with Tuesday and your bitchy EL1 peers out of mind.
Perhaps you hate Christmas because you hate your family. I’ve never met your Uncle Brett but I am firmly of the view that if you drink enough wine, no one is insufferable. So maybe you’re the problem? Maybe you’re just an irascible bore?
Socks and Lynx Africa all-in-one kit awaits. Photo: Kim Treasure.
Which leaves us with the permeating, cloying tradition of it all; the fact you can’t go to a fitting room in the Canberra Centre without hearing ‘Jingle Bell Rock’ and ‘Last Christmas’ and ‘God Rest You Merry Gentlemen’ as you fight a pair of jeans.
Hitchens (again) once wrote, in an essay in which he said Ebenezer Scrooge was “the only character” in Dickens’ story “with any personality to him”, that Christmas is “like living for four weeks in the atmosphere of a one-party state”. At this point, I think the dissent to Christmas is so shrill in the lead-up to it that it’s probably a functioning democracy.
Yet I think we should be more grateful for Christmas and all the trashy baggage it brings with it. The tradition, the rituals, the carols: it’s a connection to generations before and to generations after. I think of a particular platitudinous carol that reliably made my grandmother cry each Christmas; it was her mum’s favourite. Accordingly, I would play it each Christmas until a fierce Scottish voice would order me to stop. Christmas 2023, battling terminal cancer but fabulously sharp as ever, was my grandmother’s last. It’s now me who can’t hear it without a lump rising.
Sure, this deeply human sense of nostalgia and connection doesn’t need Christmas as its vehicle: NYE might do it, as ‘Auld Lang Syne’ acknowledges. There are also as many festivals as there are cultures, each charged with their own meaning for those who celebrate it. But in 2024 Australia, we find ourselves mostly in consensus on this one. For better or worse it brings us together. Over-commercialised? Undoubtedly, but as Oscar Wilde said, “a cynic is one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”.
Happily, the consolation for the Christmas cynic is the same as the rationale for the Christmas romantic: one 25 December will be the last.
So put on Mariah, unironically and unapologetically. It’s been a year.
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