Too much christmas
There are about two hours on Christmas day that I really enjoy.
There’s the time early in the morning when kids first wake, trembling with excitement to see if Santa Claus has been to their house. There’s their pure joy when they open a few gifts. This Christmas spirit takes hold of the house for about an hour. Then the day returns to normal.
There’s an hour or so it takes to eat Christmas lunch - or dinner - together. That presupposes it is a simple meal, with a few special treats. Not an excuse for greed, envy, glut and surplus. If you are really lucky, you might get to share a second meal with another family, or friends. Then that hour is an added bonus. But as soon as your meal is over, don’t hang around to wash the dishes as a gang. That’s when the rot starts. Dish washing is never magic at the best of times, and Christmas day can’t change that. Just leave the table, and draw a curtain over the magic till next year. Life is back to normal.
In the Charles Dickens stories of Christmas, People knock off from work an hour early on Christmas day, to go home to have their meal together. Bob Cratchitt returns to work on Boxing day.
Compare his pleasure to expectations today. We expect to be allowed to leave work at lunch time the day before Christmas. What on earth for?
The day after Christmas is expected to be a holiday, to give us a chance to recover from our excess consumption on Christmas day. If Boxing day falls, say on Saturday as it did this year, we expect a replacement holiday two days later on the Monday. Bah, humbug.
In the old Christmas poem The Night before Christmas, we hear “not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.” Today the pre Christmas house is pandemonium, wrapping too many cheap gifts to make them look not-cheap, rushing down to the mall at 11.45 pm to see if shops run by people of non-christian faith might still be open and have some more wrapping paper that we forgot to buy in the six week shopping season before Christmas day.
Christmas decorations and gift catalogues start to appear in Woolworths and Target aisles as early as late August/early September, and the majority of shoppers do not even seem to notice anything out of the ordinary in this.
There are so many office and business Christmas parties that we can’t schedule them all in the month of December. So invitations start to arrive with RSVP for early November.
I can’t even begin to think of the stupid Christmas ‘traditions’ in Australia, without getting a headache, obligatory greeting cards decorated with fake snow and songs about sleigh rides, and mistletoe where Aussie bush flowers should hang, and images of fat people wearing heavy fur coats in the middle of our summer heat.
Excess in December has become an eighth deadly sin, up there for grossness with greed, envy, sloth, pride, gluttony, lust and anger. Summer celebration of Christmas is a constant demand for “more”, “bigger”, “sooner” and “holier than thou”.
Commercial Christmas has become too much.