So,… it’s a lazy Sunday afternoon in the UK. The kids are back at school, and settled again with resigned expressions. You think you’ve just done the last mow of the season, the nights are drawing in and there’s that sickly sense of something or other at the bottom of your gut – the year in free-fall to the solstice and the feeling you really don’t want to go there again, but you’ve no choice. You need cheering up, you need a change of scene, but you don’t want to venture far from your gate, so you gravitate to your local garden centre for whom gardening has become more and more of a sideline over the years, and though it’s September, September for pity’s sake, there’s yet one more twist in the gut to come and it’s this:
Santa has arrived!
Yes. Christmas starts obscenely early these days. He probably came last week actually, but I don’t visit the garden centre much after mid-September because, well, to be honest, because of Santa, who has begun to look more cynical and even slightly sinister to me these days. Over the coming weeks he’ll be joined by his motley crew of singing animatronic reindeer, and wall to wall sparkly jingly Christmas tat. Perhaps it’s because I’m a bloke but I feel like running from the place, screaming. There will even come a point in October when the Halloween pumpkins appear, to find themselves bedecked with Christmas tinsel and holly to form a hideous chimerical nonsense.
People will buy any old crap at Christmas – stuff they wouldn’t dream of buying at any other time of year. Miniature snow-globes with your names on them – made of plastic and banged out by the million in the far-east? No way? They sold a few today – though not to me I hasten to add. For me it brings into sharp focus the shallowness of our values. We buy this crap because it’s instilled in us that we have to. And it is not the crap itself that is the essential thing – its fitness, its sentiment, its rightness. It is more the monetary value: twenty five quid for front line relatives, tenner for the lower downs, fiver for the second-cousins kids whose names you don’t recall, but they bought stuff for yours last time, so you have to do it or it will look bad. And you excuse the crap by saying it’s the thought that counts, and you’d better not grumble about it or you’ll look ungrateful, so you end up sitting there on Christmas morning with a fixed grin and a ridiculous paper hat, cooing over a pile of stuff you’d never want in a million years. What do you do? You wait a respectable period before scraping it all into the bin.
And the point of it all escapes me now. The myth of the western consumerist Christmas has swallowed down completely the real meaning of that still far away season, and turned something that should mean something in simple human terms into something so utterly repellent I want nothing to do with it at all. Ah well, only another three months to go.
The Rivendale Review 
Isn’t it Dickens and his generation that we have to thank for it–the crappy side of Christmas? No, probably not. It has to be American consumerism in all of its glorious gluttony. I had to be the one in my extended family brave enough to put a stop to the gift exchange a few years back, and some people still aren’t acknowledging my continued existence on this earth. No, it’s not just because you’re a bloke that you hate what Christmas has become. Anyone with a modicum of sense and decency would. You know what my favorite Christmas memory is? Staying home from the festivities with a sick child. It was a peaceful, quiet, and soul-satisfying day. Thanks for bringing it–the subject and the memory–up.
Thanks walk2write – glad I’m not alone. You’re a brave man and I take my hat off to you. Peaceful and soul-satisfying – good memory and thanks for sharing it.
Michael
Actually, I’m a woman, not brave, just tired of caving in to tradition, whatever that might entail. It was mainly my husband’s family festivities and traditions that I excused us from. You see, I wasn’t brave, just glad of an excuse–a woman through and through.
Yes, traditions do have a way of taking hold without our knowing it, or even knowing why we’re doing something any more.
Isn’t it strange that what is suppose to be a birth celebration for Christians has turned out to be one
of the biggest marketing seasons.
It starts earlier and earlier every year and when I worked retail, it sapped the energy, goodwill toward men, and the general spirit of the event out of myself and then those around me.
The true tradition, at least in my opinion, is not what present to get little Sue or big Bill, yet aren’t we suppose to rejoice in mankind, humanity, and good will?
Only Christ knows, and no pun intended with that written remark.
Tradition, me thinks, has nothing to do with buying “crap”
big business, big sales and just a bunch of big mess.
Tradition, mine is to be thankful give love and gifts all year long, and be very graceful in acknowledging without the birthday of December 25, I wouldn’t probably be here and the Santa myth either!
Thanks for the comment, Donnastrangelycalm. I’d not thought of that angle. I only see it from the consumers’ perspective of course and we can always escape by not going into the shops, but if you work in retail of course you’re trapped with it up close from mid-September. I’ll try to see it from the shop assistants’ point of view from now on.