Bah Humbug
[I wish readers as serene a holiday as present circumstances allow. The next blog will appear on 6 January. 2021 can only be better, I hope!]
The Economist business columnist who writes under the pseudonym Bartleby made a confession in the edition of 28 November.
Normally Bartleby’s family waits until December before putting up the Christmas decorations. But this weekend, though it is only November, the festive lights will go up…
He noticed that others were also going full Christmas early:
Some celebrities have already decorated their Christmas trees; Joan Collins, an actress, was pictured next to hers on November 10th. The local coffee shop and minimarket had dressed in fir by mid-November.
And his explanation?
These early seasonal signals have been triggered by the possibility of a long and depressing winter, in which the pandemic will disrupt traditional celebrations and families may be kept apart. There is the prospect of a vaccine but, for most people, not until the spring.
Given the toll on our mental health during the year that is drawing to a close, “…many people will be tempted to put up more Christmas lights just to have a cheerful sight.”
Research here in County Clare was restricted during November by the national lockdown which confined me to the rural roads between my home near Quin village and the town of Ennis to which I would travel for “essential shopping”. But by the time November gave way to December, I had noticed only one Christmas tree winking at me from the front room of somebody’s home. Likewise, only one display of garden lights. Our own tree went up only last week.
So perhaps Bartleby was slightly ahead of the pack in his own domestic timings.
But, in other ways, Christmas is normally well and truly underway much earlier in the month of November — and, notwithstanding the pandemic, this year is no different.
Two years ago, a Washington Post journalist published what he called the “All I want for Christmas Index of Holiday Cheer”. Using Google Trends as his source, Christopher Ingraham tracked searches on Google dating back to 2006 for Mariah Carey’s 1994 hit.
The data showed that search interest begins to register as early as September, climbing slowly but steadily through mid-October, accelerating sharply for the rest of that month, plateauing briefly around Halloween before rising almost vertically, like the most gloomy graph of COVID case numbers, from the beginning of November until Christmas Day after which it drops straight back down to earth like a stone.
Though indoor trees and outdoor displays may make their appearance later, Mr. Ingraham’s data resonates with my impression of what the public, collective “Christmas” has become — a festival that is stoked up shortly after Halloween extending maybe as far as 26 December rather than beginning on older landmark dates; 8, 24 or 25 December itself and ending on 6 January.
It is no great insight to suggest that the trend of earlier and greater “profile” for Christmas has been driven by commercial interests. They would surely argue that it is to provide a service to the laity, but it seems to me more likely a conspiracy against them.
The contemporary commercial attitude is not: “How long can we go before mentioning Christmas?” Rather, it is: “Can we find an excuse for diving into Christmas even earlier?” Christmas is no longer just an “important” or even the most important annual festival but has been inflated to a uniquely and incomparably important festival towering several country miles above every other regular annual fixture. It looms longer in the annual cycle because it looms larger.
That has been so for many years. And rather than dampening the sustained centrality of Christmas, COVID boosted it somewhat this year. All the talk during the November lockdown of whether we could “save” Christmas, what a “saved” Christmas might look like and whether saving it was worth the risk of an early subsequent lockdown, gave cover for the notion that the “season” was already out of the blocks.
The media is heavily invested in Christmas. One reason is that Christmas stories play well. “News” is no longer, if it ever was, about the sober, dry retailing of relevant “facts” or information, but about narratives — using a package built around a largely factual core to stimulate an emotional reaction in the receiver. And few things hit the bull’s eye of our emotions as effectively as Christmas; the anticipation and celebration of joyful communion within families contrasted with the sadness of loss, temporary or permanent, marked by evident absence, all surrounded by swirling pixie dust of miracle and wonder, glitter and tinsel, full and plenty.
Christmas stories are easy pickings. The media doesn’t have to go far to chase them down. It can dust down or adapt recurring hardy annual themes and tropes from its shelves. This year as every other year, we have not been left wanting for advice on how to organise the “perfect” and “stress free” Christmas Day, guidance on appropriate gifts and what to do with turkey leftovers. Deprived by COVID of the regular happy trope of returning emigrants and their families hugging at the airport, we have instead plenty of sad stories about emigrants and families kept apart by COVID — and also even of sadly empty airports.
But the main reason why the media loves Christmas is that it is a bumper period for advertising. The media want us in the “Christmas spirit” as early as is compatible with sustaining that spirit until the “big day”. The passage of Halloween (and its associated commercial opportunities) ushers in what might otherwise be the dreary desert of November, a month to be survived rather than celebrated and to which an injection of Christmas “cheer” is something of an antidote.
Of course, the “spirit” they are trying to get us into is nothing to do with what some might call “the real meaning” of Christmas. During the modern Christmas “season”, we are presented with much more information about how to cook a turkey and what gifts to buy than we hear about the significance of Advent and the mystery of the Nativity. The iconography is of laden tables, Santa, sleighs and snow (how often do we see the last around Christmas anyway?) rather than stable, angels, shepherds or Magi.
Secular splurging is the sacred social currency of “Christmas” these days. The cavalcade of advertising encouraging us to empty our pockets rolls from early November. Television advertisements to a cosy background of Christmas trees surrounded by mountain ranges of impeccably wrapped gifts and gadgets, dining tables groaning with more perfectly prepared and presented food (and no shortage of drink) than any normal family could possibly eat, all with the pasteurised “authenticity” of an airbrushed Playboy centrefold.
I am old enough to remember when most shops remained closed through St. Stephen’s Day and some “sales” might even wait a few more days. This “moratorium” represented a light doffing of the hat to the notion that commerce was only a lubricant of the Christmas spirit rather than the essence of it. Now, the post-Christmas sales from 26 December on are only a mild encore to the headline acts, a full month before Christmas itself. Elevated by the genius of marketing to the status of “tradition” Black Friday and Cyber Monday is a much more important commercial harvest time than the post-Christmas period.
I moan about this not to be provocatively contrarian or a Grinch but because of genuine concern that the modern Christmas just isn’t very good for us.
Sustaining pleasurable anticipation and good cheer through such an extended whirlwind of pre-Christmas preparation and socialising requires the resilience and resolution of a marathon runner. I suspect for many of us, Christmas itself comes as relief and release from accumulated fatigue and stress rather than as an apex of happiness and joy.
The ritual and structurally predictable nature of Christmas Day itself makes it beyond challenging for the reality to rise to the hype. Reflect on your own experience. How often has Christmas itself been more anti-climax than climax — a flitting, wispy promise that proves impossible to grasp and that has slipped through your fingers long before the clock ticks over into Saint Stephen’s Day. If that is how it is for you, maybe it’s time to reflect on Einstein’s observation that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.
Relatedly, it warrants reflection that there are many in our society for whom the depth of their pockets make it impossible to create a Christmas reality at all close to the publicly promoted version and for whom the Christmas period is a fraught triangulation reconciling possibility to the spectrum between hope and expectation.
The pre-reformed Scrooge hunched scowling in his counting house on Christmas Eve was not a very nice person, but he got some things right. Visited by his penniless but cheerful nephew inviting him to dinner the following day and encouraging his old uncle to make merry and not be cross, Scrooge countered:
What else can I be when I live in such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas! What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in ’em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you?
Christmas isn’t all or only about people spending money they don’t have or can ill afford on things they or the people who end up with them mightn’t need or for which they won’t sustain the want. But it is a lot about that. During the most recent lockdown, the prospects of local retailers having a narrower sales window ahead of Christmas was frequently represented as being especially grave because they routinely make a third or more of their annual revenue in the month or so leading up to it.
I can’t recall hearing anybody query whether such high dependence on so short an annual windfall was a sensible or sustainable business — or consumption — model. If anything, the thrust of commentary seemed to be in the opposite direction. It was presumed to be “natural” — and there was something close to a social obligation on us consumers to spend even more liberally to preserve it.
The shape of the modern Christmas is not the result of a dastardly plot. It has simply evolved independently of specific human agency; an aggregate outcome of multiple individual choices. But it has become an involuntary runaway two-step between sellers and buyers that is to the enduring benefit of neither. And because it is an aggregated outcome, it will be difficult to dial it down, never mind wind it up.
COVID has burst the balloons of many nostrums of conventional wisdom about how life must be lived and has certainly disrupted the pattern of Christmas for this year. Only time will tell if it has rewritten the play book altogether.
