Christmas: the annual ordeal

Matthew Willey finds it difficult to get into the spirit of the holiday season.

It's over now. But Christmas for me is an annual ordeal. I loathe it.

But even typing this admission, I hear the intake of breath from you who are more tolerant of the festival than I am. I anticipate your reply, having been at the receiving end of your disapproval for years: scrooge, killjoy, grumpy old curmudgeon. But let me explain. Just for once I ask that, rather than reaching for these easy labels, you fun-loving Christmas partygoers set aside few minutes to hear me out.

Think about what you might need to do to opt out of Christmas. Try to imagine that. If you think that Christmas is a benign anniversary, think again.

Back in my heady, optimistic thirties (ah, youth!) I made the decision to cancel Christmas. I announced that I would not be celebrating Christmas, and asked that cards, presents etc should be expressed in donations to charity or not at all. Gifts and cards would certainly not be returned. My house would not be decorated. No. I would not have a Merry Christmas. I saw too much to dislike in this seasonal indulgence and would have nothing more to do with it.

"Just when I thought I was out … they pull me back in," says poor, tormented Michael Corleone as he tries to leave the mafia. Unlike me he is heir to a vast crime syndicate, but like me he finds that making a clean break, and becoming an honest man are not easy things to accomplish. But he didn't try giving Christmas the boot. In trying to leave Christmas, you are fighting several formidable organisations, not just one. To refute it you set yourself up against Christianity, tradition, consumerism, Charles Dickens, and your mum. This list is in order of formidability; I leave it to you to decide in which direction it runs.

So let's run through those adversaries and see why I have, after years of campaigning, convinced not one person to join me in this boycott. Christ of course was not born on Christmas Day. It's completely arbitrary by popular admission. January the 6th was an equally unlikely contender which has been largely dropped. It is well established that the festival is a midwinter celebration to which Christianity has simply cut and pasted its own deity. I'm not saying we should get jiggy with the pagans and celebrate Yule and dance around an evergreen staff with their unvaccinated children. No. On this I would get some easy backing from the Puritans who would, even though Christians, support me in my quest to have the festival excised from the calendar. There are plenty of Christians who look at the dubious aspects of Christmas and share my distaste. I'm not sure how happy I am about this, but I'll take what backing I can.

More than the weight of religion which (as side-lined Christians plaintively point out) is but a fraction of the event, tradition is the killer. There is a window furnishings showroom near where I live, and in huge letters, white on black, a fundamental truth is declared: CUSTOM BLINDS (their 'caps lock'). The festival is lodged like shrapnel in the spine. Standing alone, and saying I do not want to be a part of this is akin to King Canute's take on the tides. I have hundreds of years of history to undo and I am not sure I can do it by refusing to send Christmas cards. Christmas is a relentless juggernaut, awesome when seen from the outside and terrifying to stand in front of. Simply announcing that one is no longer participating is just pissing into the wind.

In Western European societies such as New Zealand, Christmas has been exquisitely constructed as a viral memetic advertising campaign. It was memetic before Richard Dawkins came up with a word for it. The tradition of Christmas is insidious, adapting to new cultures and taking on fresh expression where it lands. I love Tim Minchin, of course, but anyone who has actually drunk white wine in the sun knows an hour or two later that they have dug themselves a deep hole. Tim's family also sound quite nice, another reason to think he is working from a fairly small data set.

Rebecca Watson spoke to the Wellington Skeptics about the whole Christmas thing, and a good night was had by all. Her central thesis was that we can enjoy Christmas more as nonbelievers, because we don't have guilt or the obligation to go to church on the day in question. We can even drink white wine in the sun if we like. In fact, we had a moral obligation to lead the way with our nondevotional enjoyment, and I certainly tried that for a while. But the elephant in the room is consumerism, and it fills me with horror that we do this to ourselves every year.

Every year, the consumption of goods goes into overdrive. On a planet of limited resources, where normally rhetoric dictates that we should consume less, recycle more, save rather than spend, exist on less; suddenly the message is consume, my people, consume. Rampant squandering of economic and manufacturing resources go into producing goods that are offered as gifts to uncaring recipients. Children tear the wrappers from gift after gift whilst adults thank each other for stuff that will go into opshops in the coming months. Meanwhile the money supply crashes, personal debt rises, suicides rates climb and, stuffed with Christmas food and white wine in the sun, more people of my age go into cardiac arrest. The dust settles in January and the world has less of everything to go around, except for carbon dioxide.

Riding it all, driving the psychology of relentless participation, is a creation that would have its maker turning in the grave. Criticise Christmas and the pantomime character of Ebenezer Scrooge is wheeled out. I'm trying to have an honest discussion about the merits of the festival, and in my face, like a fierce rebuttal sponsored by K-Mart and McDonalds and Sony and Apple … is Ebenezer Scrooge. If you don't go along with the tradition of Christmas, you are likened unto Scrooge. Scrooge is the industrial-strength strawman that makes us fear saying anything negative about the festival. Were he alive today, Dickens would be richly rewarded as an advertising genius, for his services to industry. I can't think of a richer irony.

But the adversary that keeps removing the stake from between the ribs of Christmas, and letting it live for another year is family. Even if you have a parent who is patient enough to listen to these well-founded arguments, they will not stop sending you socks, books and cards, despite determined pre-announced nonreciprocity. And if you are unfortunate enough to have children your fate is sealed. Oh, I could inflict upon them the fate of the single Jehovah's Witness at our secondary school, who attracted horrified and uncomprehending attention by announcing that there would be no Christmas for her. But that kind of scrutiny, and the cheery effort she made to hide her pain, is emotional baggage I have no stomach for.

So despite all of my good reasons for not doing so, I lie to my children about a mythical figure who presents to them goods made at the North Pole, with Grandma's writing on the label, and wake with them at 5.30 in the morning. I watch their little faces light up at toys from China that will be forgotten by lunchtime under a tree that I helped them decorate and which consumes futile power in the bright summer evenings. I will do my best to ignore their excited squeals and the dozens of photographs I take of them, I assure you, are for the record only. I will try not to eat too much at lunchtime, and later look forward to when I can put the ghastly tinsel back in the box. This year I had to give in a little, yield ground. But look at how the odds are stacked. Perhaps next year, finally, people will listen. Perhaps next year will be the year the tree stays in the attic.