IT'S December 1, we’re in a coffee shop sharing a quiet moment and a large Bakewell tart.  Over the white-noise of the cappuccino chit-chat, the familiar and unwelcome peal of synthesized bells drifts out of the mounted speakers.  My nose wrinkles.  Do They Know It’s Christmas – the most mawkish of the wheeled-out seasonal ditties.  Felix spots the shift in my face. 

“You don’t like Christmas songs?!” 

“No, not really.  Actually, I really dislike them.” 

My five-year-old audibly gasps.  By the look on his face, I may as well have just punched Santa.  I feel horrible.  I wish I’d engaged that social honey of the little white lie – a necessary, if not entirely ethical, parenting tool.  As a general principle, I try not to lie around my children, or any children for that matter.  It insults their intelligence.  I generally feel cornered by the cultural convention that is the flippant fibbery necessitated each December.  For a moment, I’d forgotten myself, and confessed without giving thought to his feelings.  I’d outed myself as Scrooge-mum, the unabashed Christmas-hater.  I fear I may have coloured my son’s perceptions of me unfairly, given his lack of ken that I am in fact the fat, jolly, bearded chap who furnishes the house with gifts each year. 

Before I had children, I could consciously opt out, but that particular personal ideology does not transpose onto parenting.  I’m often the first to bemoan the festivities, only caving to social pressure to have a tree last year.  I freely admit to others that I hate Christmas.  Far from being too strong a word, it’s really too simplistic a denouncement.  Of course, there are elements I enjoy – namely cake, lashings of booze and time off work – but when considering it holistically, I’m unashamedly Team Humbug.  What tempers my overarching feelings about the holiday is the mindless giving – the gifting of crap that binds you to another through the obligation to provide further crap.  Even as a Catholic child, I thought the gifting was the oddest part of the story – why were three strange men giving a newborn perfume, gold and an ointment they rub on corpses to stop the stink?  Those are the last things an infant needs. 

In the western world we view gift-giving as selfless, as an expression of our civility and hospitality to others.  In 1950, French sociologist Marcel Mauss wrote The Gift – a seminal anthropological work that laid the foundations for the theories of reciprocity’s role in society.  He posited that the exchange of gifts is central to relationship building.  The giving of a gift seems little more than voluntary generosity on the surface, but carries three crucial elements: the obligation to give, the obligation to receive and the obligation to give back.  Mauss argued that to examine the nature of gift exchange is to look directly at the very foundations of social cohesion and integration.  But far from taking on a single, simple form, reciprocity often resides in complex systems that take on a different and at times negative function. 

While writing The Gift, Mauss studied potlatch among native Pacific northwest communities.  During this custom, tribes host grand banquets and are showered with costly gifts that are then burned or tossed into the sea.  It’s a contorted form or reciprocity, where the goal is not to forge social bonds through becoming beholden to others, but to revel in the bravado of wealth.  It’s a display of, “look at how much we don’t need all of these nice, expensive things”.  Though it seems a world away, it’s not hard to draw parallels between this and the extravagance and conspicuous consumption practised in contemporary western Christmas.  The excessive food, the novelty gifts, the 300,000 trees cut down to make a billion Christmas cards each year. 

The average British family spends more than £800 on Christmas – and on what?  We live in the UK.  Those of us who aren’t struggling – what do we really need?  Is it ethical to indulge in such wanton gluttony when so many have nothing?  What are we really getting out of Christmas, other than a bit fat and a diminished bank balance?  Whatever significance this symbolic exchange once held for society, only the faintest of echoes remain.  We’ve moved from conscious giving to a sort of zombie reciprocity – it looks like generosity, but the brain is no longer engaged. 

We convince ourselves that Christmas has universal meaning – celebration, fun, wonderment– but that’s a shallow, hyper-local interpretation.  It’s not what it means to the Chinese factory worker putting in 11-hour days, six days a week, for 86p an hour to furnish western children with the latest Barbie or Hot Wheels toys.  It’s not what it means to the half a million elderly people alone on Christmas Day.  It’s not what it means to the thousands of families who can barely afford to heat their homes, without the added seasonal pressures.  Christmas spirit has become a collective jamming of fingers into ears, where for a few weeks a year we ignore the realities of what we’re partaking in. 

A few years ago, I wrote a news bulletin about food banks.  The organisation had two piles of wrapped donated presents – one pink and one blue – so each child who came through the door had at least one thing to open on Christmas morning.  It was instantly sobering.  The thought that a parent had no say in not just what their child received, but if they got a gift at all.  The Santa story falls apart in the face of poverty.  How do you tell a child that he passed your house by?  That was the moment my last drop of festive cheer evaporated for good. 

With each passing year I feel more disenchanted with what increasingly seems like a charade – a facsimile happiness that causes more harm than good. 

Last January, I walked through Edinburgh’s New Town at dusk.  The immaculate Georgian Streets could be a postcard at Christmas.  Each great grey townhouse, lambent with the light of candles, lamps and fireplaces.  But I was fractionally too late.  Outside each was a tree, limp, and rotting on the kerb until the council collection.  Leftover Christmas cheer turned to a stabbing sadness as I surveyed each one.  Each the product of years of incredible biological processes.  It’s a profound statement that we’ll toss the very lungs of our planet unceremoniously dumped into the gutter when the holiday is over.  As with the food bank, it was a further slip of the mask.  I realised how much we need the tinsel and the lights and the chocolate and the food to distract from the reality.  Christmas is waste. 

Can we consciously continue down this path in the face of growing inequality and diminishing resources?  Mauss reckoned gift-giving is the glue that binds us – I think it’s time we got better glue.  If you don’t need anything, say so.  It’ll raise eyebrows, but you can refuse to partake. 

By all means, eat the mince pies, drink the nice wine, spend the time with family – but if you’re doing okay think about opting out of the excess.  Through your refusal, you are giving something back.  You free others from monetary commitment, the mental arithmetic of gifting, and in some small way reduce the pressure on the planet.