Bah humbug to those images of perfection – this time I’ll treasure the simple pleasures
I’M dreaming of a pared-back Christmas with some good food, a nice fire, my family around me watching some festive films and that’s it really. I’m fed up trying so hard. This year I just want to take it back to what it should be about – spending time with the people I care about without spending a fortune.
I hope this doesn’t make me sound like Scrooge. I love Christmas and I’m hoping Santa will come, or there will be two very disappointed small people in my house on December 25. But having said every year that I am not spending the week before Christmas running around like a headless chicken, this year I mean it.
I agree that it truly is the most wonderful time of the year. But in recent years my experience of Christmas begins with a gnawing sense of panic that I am way behind the game.
The ads – the big retailers have spent millions on them – tell us how Christmas should look. They tell us what we should be wearing for Christmas Day (velvet, apparently this year), what we should be serving up with the turkey, how the table should be dressed, the music to play and the colour schemes that will make Christmas “perfect”.
The big companies rolled out the big guns for their Christmas campaigns some time back. There’s Moz the Monster for John Lewis, Paddington Bear for M&S, and Kevin, a love-struck carrot, for Aldi. The message wrapped in a big red bow to tug at your heart-strings is also designed to open your wallet and convince you that Christmas will not be perfect if you don’t have the feather-embellished wrapping paper and monogrammed silk pyjamas.
That uneasy and sometimes all-consuming feeling that you’re missing out on something is transformed into something more unwieldy at this time of year. FOMOC (the Fear of Missing Out on the perfect Christmas) seems to be at the root of much of the buying. If I just have this one thing, attend that one party, then Christmas will be transformed, we tell ourselves.
But the arrival of Santa at our local shopping centre on November 11, before all the treats gathered on Halloween night were even eaten, puts a chill in my heart that hasn’t quite lifted. The constant feed of saccharine-sweet ads with their faux cheerfulness is stiffening my resolve to just pare it all back.
The final straw was picking up a magazine earlier this week, advising me I still had time to have a new bathroom or kitchen fitted and if I did it now imagine all the fun I would have adding all those gorgeous finishing touches.
The icing on the cake for me was when a party-organiser, giving advice on how to be the perfect hostess, used the word “tablescape” when talking about the colours for linen and glassware.
This is right up there with the new “tradition” of getting your loved-ones Christmas Eve boxes stuffed with new pyjamas, socks and a movie that they can snuggle up with. The box can be wooden or paper (it can also be personalised) and in most cases costs more than the contents.
Most people’s Christmas doesn’t look like an ad. Mine is certainly not picture perfect. Real life is messy, stressful and full of ups and downs.
For many people life is much harsher. St Vincent de Paul has an ad that shows the reality for many families waking up to empty cupboards at Christmas. Homelessness means thousands of people don’t have a bed of their own to sleep in, or a roof over their head. Bereavement during the year makes Christmas something to “get through”, rather than celebrate. The marketing hype projection of the perfect consumer Christmas becomes truly ridiculous in these circumstances.
I don’t think I’m alone in dreaming of something more meaningful for my family, something that doesn’t involve “getting” or “buying”.
So I am trying hard to do things that are not about going to the shops and running to a standstill for hours on end. I’m trying hard to do things that involve spending
For most people, Christmas doesn’t look like an ad. Real life is messy, stressful and full of ups and downs
time together as a family.
As Patrick Kavanagh put it so beautifully in his poem ‘Advent’: “Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder.” In the same poem he talks about the newness that was in every stale thing when we looked at it as children.
WE don’t need Christmas to be perfect for our kids, or even for ourselves. Perfect can’t be shop-bought because it doesn’t exist, except in some marketer’s dream. If you think it’s going to be perfect, you’re already setting yourself up for disappointment.
The search for the right dress, the right toys, the right napkins, is nothing short of futile, not to mention exhausting. Doing things instead of buying stuff is what I’m aiming for – just simple things like going for walks, listening to Christmas songs, watching telly, generally taking time out from the busy every day to do very little, together. The magic of Christmas happens in the real stuff of life.
In the end what we’ll distil into the pure gold of Christmas memory are the simple things: the joy of watching the excitement on our kids’ faces on Christmas Eve, and being with the people we love.
Long after the sheen has worn off the expensive baubles, and when the unnecessary gifts have been consigned to the charity shop, what we will have left are memories of happy times and hopes for more to come. It doesn’t have to be perfect to be wonderful all the same.