I detest consumer holidays and I particularly dislike the commercialisation of Christmas. That there are certain days of the year when you have to buy friends and family members gifts or become a pariah is absolute anathema to me. I think it’s the contrivance that does my head in; I enjoy buying gifts spontaneously and Christmas has become the opposite of that. It’s now (for the middle class, at least) a kind of consumerist circle jerk where we trudge through shopping centres and wonder what the hell we’re going to buy for people who don’t want for anything and then on December 25 feign gratitude as we unwrap gifts we don’t need.
The sheer number of commercial holidays doesn’t help. Add Valentine’s Day (the most odious of them all, in my opinion) to Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Easter, and half a dozen birthdays, and you’re pretty much buying a ‘special’ present for someone every month.
Gifts purchased on the spur of the moment and given as a surprise are almost always better gifts, too. Upon returning from my first work trip overseas, for instance, I bought my stepfather a bottle of Glenfiddich scotch from the airport’s duty free area. He’s never forgotten that. And some years ago, while walking through North Sydney, station I saw a plush dog toy that I thought my wife would like. I was right. She still loves it.
It’s much easier to be grateful for something when you don’t expect to receive it. Kids love Christmas because they can’t, for the most part, buy things they want during the rest of the year, so gratitude comes easily. Go back a century or so and the greater adult population was in the same boat. They did not have ‘disposable income’ and would spend an entire year scrimping and saving so they could buy humble but meaningful gifts for those closest to them. Christmas was an occasion. Nowadays, it’s just another square on the consumerist calendar.
Add to that the rise in atheism – it’s at all-time highs among the post-Boomer generations, and Australia has one of the largest per-capita atheist populations in the world – and you start to wonder why we bother celebrating Christmas at all.
Well, these are my thoughts on the matter.
Christmas is the one day each year when we set aside time for family. Not just the individuals in our households, but those on the drip line of our family trees. If the past ten years (from my mid-twenties to my mid-thirties) have taught me anything, it’s that family matters. That’s a shocking cliché, perhaps, but that doesn’t preclude it from being right. Friendships, on the other hand, are transient. My twenty-five-year-old self would scoff if I travelled back in time to tell him that, but in my experience friendships are far more susceptible to the vagaries of life. When you veer left or right along a fork in the road, it is a friend that is most likely to roll off the back of the wagon and be left in the dust. Family members tend to be bolted down. Constant. You’re stuck with them, for good or ill, and even if you have more ill ones than good, it means you’re never really going to be lonely.
That’s what Christmas is to me. It’s a day when I feel gratitude for what I have.
As opposed to what I own.