Is it Time to Call Time on Christmas?
By: Justine L
Tags: Single Life, Consumerism, Culture, Mental Health, Christmas

What does it even mean anyway?

Photo by Isadora Tabordes on Unsplash

In these uncertain times, one thing is certain: Christmas will roll around again on 25 December. For many people it will be a different kind of Christmas. My heart goes out to families who are separated at a time of the year that they are longing to be together; even more so for those who have lost someone.

This is a perfect opportunity to re-evaluate what this yearly cultural festival is all about. Apart from the obvious pandemic-driven logistical issues, there seems to be a distinctly different feeling about Christmas this year. Tell me I’m imagining an advertising pitch that is cranking up the novelty and whimsy as a means of temporary escape from the year from hell. Maybe I’ve just seen too many Aldi ads.

For a number of years, I’ve not been quite sure what to do about Christmas. It just never seems to come together. It hasn’t really been the same since I was a child and Christmas was shrouded in the mystery and intrigue of an impending visit from Santa Clause.

Despite the inevitability of Christmas, it has a way of creeping up on me each year. I don’t prioritise it as a good woman should. Before I know it, we’re a week out and I haven’t so much as nodded in the direction of a shopping mall. You would think the constant chatter about Christmas plans would galvanise me into action but it just serves to entrench my inertia.

Around me I hear tales of gifts purchased and ordered and meals planned. It gets to the point where I want to weaponise an angel ornament against the next person who asks “have you done your Christmas Shopping?” or “are you ready for Christmas?”.

These utterances require more unpacking that Santa’s sleigh. They are loaded with the same kind of gendered expectations responsible for the women folk slaving in the kitchen whilst the men loll about out of sight. It’s the women who purchase Christmas presents for and send cards to their husband’s family. Once again it’s a case of women taking on the physical, mental and emotional labour for everything on the home front. Because like everything else in the whole world, Christmas is gendered. No-one ever asks a man if he is ready for Christmas.

The gendered expectations of Christmas come to a head in Angry Christmas Lady. When I worked as a retail sales assistant in my university days this was a recognised phenomenon. This is the woman who has deliberated since October on whether she will serve up a hot or cold meal on Christmas Day (in Australia this is a thing). We knew to treat this customer very delicately lest we be the straw that broke the camel’s back in between her hasty purchase of a shirt for uncle Keith and the rush to the butcher to pick up the pre-ordered ham. One wrong move could push her over the edge.

You can see the weight of Christmases past, present and future weighing heavily on this woman’s shoulders. She is carrying everyone’s Christmas hopes and dreams. It is because of this woman that Christmas seamlessly comes together for them year after year.

I do not want to be Angry Christmas Lady. I want to put my foot right through this house of Christmas cards

For a start, the expectation that you should buy a stack of presents for people purely because the calendar has once again rolled around to a particular time of year is ridiculous. No-one even wants this stuff. This expectation has been responsible for countless awkward workplace interactions, family conflicts and fallings-out between friends. And that’s when both sides come to the party. It’s even more fraught when one side disregards their part of the bargain and fronts up in giftless brazenness.

Doing the shopping for these gifts is a monumental task, particularly for those who are not enthusiastic shoppers at the best of times. I favour the quick dash in and out, preferably on a rainy Tuesday morning. I know what I want and where to get it and the operation is quick, targeted and results in minimal collateral damage. But when you are purchasing for other people there are so many variables: colours, sizes, varieties, empty shelves. Trying to find an appropriate gift for someone is like waiting for a pot to boil. You never find something when you’re looking for it.

Defeated, you head home and resign yourself to the reality of another trip to source two more colours of ribbon, a spare roll of wrapping paper and something else to go with the so far pitiful offering for Aunty Pat. And you still haven’t heard back from your sister-in-law about the precise details of your nephew’s latest obsession.

For those of us with sensory processing issues, a trip to the local shopping Mecca is never going to be pleasant. A dazzling array of light, colour and movement and way too many people. If the shops are in the high street, you have the elements to contend with. In my case, I’m likely to be a sweaty dehydrated mess before I’m through, thanks to the southern hemisphere summer. And you’d better have given yourself a decent buffer of recovery time before knuckling down to the Christmas day prep.

Of course online shopping is an option but with that comes the anxiety of more variables. The postal service is under unprecedented strain and contingency plans are needed for when items aren’t quite what you ordered.

I should be grateful that to an extent, my life circumstances have insulated me somewhat from Christmas-driven expectations. For a start, the absence of a male partner has allowed me to conveniently bypass all the gendered nonsense that goes along with it. My female ex-partner and parent of my child comes from a small family so we’ve been spared the Christmas day tug-of-war.

It would be a simple matter just to avoid the whole affair if I didn’t have a child. I would happily disappear, go off grid for a week, emerging after the rest of the world has seen in the new year. But my child is the tie that binds me to the annual event so I must find a way of negotiating my observation of it.

I realise that there’s a lot of ground between slavishly following cultural practices and throwing them out altogether. It’s about fleshing out that middle ground with your own meaning and building your own rituals.

To be fair, my family of origin has taken a pragmatic approach to Christmas. A few years ago, my two brothers and I acknowledged the zero-sum game absurdity of exchanging gift vouchers with each other. Now that we all have children, we broadly acknowledge that they have too much stuff which in any event is topped up by birthdays. By way of compromise, we tried a scheme based on dividing the buying for our children between the three of us (or in my brothers’ case, their wives). Effectively it meant that each child got one decent present that was more likely to be something they wanted. However, it ceased to work when siblings ended up with four, two and one child. I suppose we’ll come up with an alternative that manages to deliver a present to each child.

Maybe one day we’ll all realise the pointlessness of the gift giving as my siblings and I did. I look around and see people devising easier options. They realise it’s a cultural institution that isn’t going away any time soon but they don’t have the energy to overthrow it any more than they have the energy to spend the Saturday before Christmas at the local shopping mall. So, to the parent who organises other parents to contribute to a gift voucher for the twenty-something male teacher, I say thank you. You are conserving the collective energy whilst keeping everyone happy.

So what can be salvaged from this? What do I want Christmas to mean? If I search myself, it’s the rituals, the atmospherics. It’s drinking a toast in the silence of the last moments of Christmas Eve as the fairy lights blink in the dark. There might be soft Christmassy music in the background and the scent of pine leaves carried by the breeze.

We need rituals and their value is precisely in the meaning that we give them. There is something to be said for marking the passing of one year and looking towards the next, particularly when it’s been such a dumpster fire of a year. There is a need to collectively process and make sense of it all.

In years to come, I picture myself spending Christmas somewhere remote and untouched. Perhaps by myself, perhaps with someone who shares my life path. Whatever. I will look out on it all from my vantage of life experience and wisdom and it will all make sense. I will want for nothing.

Merry Christmas to one and all.