Let’s consider the future of Christmas
When asked to ponder what celebrating Christmas might look like in the future, my imagination ran amok.
The twinkling lights adorning our rented houses (we stopped being able to afford to buy them decades ago) will be controlled by virtual assistants named Siri, Alexa or Cortana. The presents beneath the tree will have been delivered the day before by drones. Malls will have been long obsolete (and as a result, Mariah Carey’s All I Want For Christmas Is You hasn’t been heard in years). Society finally will have given up the Santa Claus charade. Instead, children pose for festive photographs perched on a lifesized Amazon logo.
Half of those present around the table will be beaming in from remote locations, smiling through screens atop their placemats. Grandparents, cryogenically preserved, will observe proceedings as disembodied heads in jars.
The traditional feast will be planned, prepared and served by the men, who’ll bicker goodnaturedly over whether to sieve or stir the gravy. The ladies will be busy snacking on roasted crickets and washing them down with eggnog-spiked Soylent.
The ham will have begun life in a petri dish.The plant protein ‘‘turkey’’ will be 3D-printed into convincingly poultry-esque proportions. Salad leaves will have been hydroponically grown in the conservatory; potatoes will be low-carb.
Summer temperatures will have soared so high that al fresco dining is intolerable. Confined to our dining rooms, curtains drawn, we won’t be counting on a refreshing stroll along the beach later, either. New Zealand’s coastline succumbed to rising sea levels long ago.
Certainly, the world is changing but the best predictor of the future is the past, and when it comes to Christmas, our behaviour has tended to buck common sense in favour of stubborn tradition.
Since Pa¯ keha¯ set foot in Aotearoa, Kiwis have clung to the types of Christmases celebrated in the motherland, concocting Victorian-style roast dinners. The barbecue and the pavlova and My Food Bag’s Christmas option notwithstanding, December 25 is not historically a day we exhibit our Kiwi ingenuity.
Our behaviour beyond Jesus’ birthday is similarly retrograde. We read and ignore articles about how to avoid overdoing it in the silly season, opting to subsist on leftover delicacies. We whinge about consumerism and otherwise-estranged family members, and yet max out our credit cards and break bread with the insufferable humans we happen to be related to.
Why? Because it’s Christmas: a festive expression that offers an ironclad excuse for a litany of deadly sins – gluttony, greed and sloth chief among them. When else, for example, can you consume bacon-wrapped prunes in a horizontal position without those in the vicinity batting an eyelid? Because, Christmas.
So while our future selves might be eating insects and labgrown meats for most of the year, there’ll remain a hallowed window where we’ll cling to our Christmas traditions with a vicelike grip. The holiday will be among the few, comforting reminders of that simpler time, where animals were raised in battery farms and we could walk barefoot by the sea.