So. Christmas Day has come and gone. And all that pre-Christmas confusion I felt about the nature of the event has evaporated in the relaxing glow of Life After Christmas. I no longer feel the need to delve into my past and my personality to work out “what it all means for me” and am happy to concur with the profound statement of my wise friend, who sent me an email on Christmas Eve, saying “Just read latest post and I can tell you – Christmas is just another day.” She did go on to add stuff about family traditions and spending all day in her pyjamas, but this did not detract from the simplicity of the message.
Just like a Christmas present, we wrap the day in shiny prettiness, and try to make it seem mysterious and special. But the moment we take off the wrapping, we see it for what it really is. Just a thing. It might be a nice thing, or a not so nice thing, but in the end it is just another thing. Just another day.
But although I no longer feel the need to gaze into the Navel of the Nativity, I must admit I have been doing a little bit of Christmassy reflecting over the last couple of days, and since I have the usual bugger-all else to write about, I thought I might as well share some of these reflections with anyone who is bored enough with their own festivities to be surfing the internet in search of mindless nonsense with which to fill their existential emptiness.
When I was a child, Christmas seemed very special to me. There were a lot of rituals leading up to The Day which served to escalate the anticipation, and were themselves delightful. My father (who was a baker-confectioner during my early life) made our own Christmas pudding and Christmas cake, and the mixtures for each would be prepared weeks beforehand, and sit around the house marinating in buckets bursting with a fruity (and alcoholic) aroma. And I would watch in awed fascination on the day when our cake, and those he made for friends and family, were iced and decorated with traditional snow scenes and a huge amount of easy-looking skill. We stuffed dates with green and pink and yellow marzipan, and laid them out in pretty zig-zags in boxes to give to people. We made miles of paper chains, with all the sticky, multi-coloured fun that that entailed. We blew up long and round balloons, and played with them, making them stick to the walls and our clothes with static electricity, before tying in them in bundles at the corners of the room. We got the tree decorations and the lights down from the loft, and hours would pass as my father tried to locate the blown bulbs that were stopping the lights working, and my sister and I rummaged through the box of decorations, greeting long-forgotten friends and reliving the nostalgia of Christmas Trees Past.
We collected pine cones and holly from the woods and make our own table decorations. My mother and I went carol singing with members of the church choir on long, finger-numbing chilly nights, made bearable by kind invitations into various parishioners’ cosy homes for mince pies and sherry-for-the-grown-ups. I wrote letters to Santa and posted them up the chimney (there was always a good draught above the coal fire in our house). I made presents out of general house-hold rubbish – like a cigarette box for my dad, made from an empty tin of plasters, covered with green crepe paper. We spent hours wrapping small, cheap gifts to hang on the tree, in last year’s wrapping paper – carefully saved and folded and packed away for re-use as presents were unwrapped. And of course I hung my stocking from the mantelpiece on Christmas Eve, in the sure knowledge that it would be bursting with surprises and oranges and chocolate money in the very early morning whilst my parents still slept.
There is no doubt about it, the lead-up to Christmas day was lovely. But looking back I suspect that much of the pleasure of it was lost in the Looking Forward. So much time was spent thinking about ‘getting ready for Christmas’, that some of the joy in each of those getting-ready activities was lost.
And The Day itself was loaded with such a burden of anticipated specialness that it buckled under the weight of excessive expectation, and by lunch time had already subsided in a tumble of disillusionment. By the evening, with the magical pile of mysterious gifts around the tree transformed into a pile of mundane stuff and a box full of crumpled paper, and the special dinner transformed into a pile of greasy washing-up and congealed left-overs, the house was filled with a cloud of gloomy disappointment, tinged red and green at the edges by the lights still flashing with pathetic optimism on the tousled tree, like a puppy still bouncing, long after its owner has lost enthusiasm for the game.
I think as I grew older, the knowledge of that impending disappointment, lurking at the back-end of the longed-for day, became a constant companion to my seasonal thoughts, as I tried to prepare for its inexorable arrival, in the hope that it would not overwhelm me with its post-Christmas malaise. But, like being told not to think about a polar bear, and then not being able to banish polar bears from your thoughts, trying to be mentally prepared for the post-festivity let-down simply meant that it clocked-in earlier and earlier each year.
By the time I had become an adult, with children of my own, and the opportunity to grow some new Christmas Traditions, I found myself waging an annual battle against the inevitable disenchantment, impeded yet further by the burden of my desire to protect my children from the crashing dullness of reality that I knew awaited them the moment that I could no longer keep the magic plate spinning.
And so for me, Christmas became a potent mixture of dread and excitement, of delight and disappointment, baked up every year into a confection of fallaciousness, which left a lingering legacy of surfeit and indigestion in equal measure.
When actually, all it really is, and all it can ever be, is Just Another Day.
