Have a merry Chrexit
Did you grow up with Christmas? Do you hate it? Here are five ways to turn your back on festive hideousness ...
AS December grinds into full-tinselled enormity, may I offer a simple reminder regarding Christmas: you don’t have to do it — and now is the time to act.
Because, really, isn’t the whole rigmarole utterly ghastly? What begins with colleagues asking, “So, what are you doing for it?” in October, continues with the unleashing of dismal Christmas ads in November, and ends in a mass of sodden self-recrimination come January 3 — and not one single second of it is compulsory.
Being an atheist, without children and with a nutjob family, for well over a decade now I have been mistress of Christmas abstinence. However, this year I have been struck by how many other people are giving the whole thing the heave-ho. My lone anti-festive stance is threatening to become a full-on Chrexit.
Yuletide refuseniks are becoming a thing.
Blame Marie Kondo and her bestseller about ridding oneself of one’s possessions, or blame postrecessionary malaise — but legions of us have developed a phobia about all the stuff that comes with Christmas, and don’t like what it does to us.
Nevertheless, extricating oneself from the festive onslaught takes work — work that must begin right here, right now. If you want to ensure a happy Chrexit, you must choose your escape route.
Plan your exit
One family I know is leaving the country so that, as the mother puts it, “I can avoid hating myself, my husband, my in-laws and my kids.”
But getting away for Christmas is not without its unwanted gifts. I myself have arranged a Chrexit in Sicily — so, naturally, this means that Mount Etna has just exploded. I now await a Mafia meltdown.
Go to work
Many Chrexit devotees choose to work over Christmas or use the quiet time to take pleasure in performing otherwise unpleasant tasks, such as their tax return, dog washing or oven cleaning.
I used to sign up for festive shifts, until it was put to me by a colleague that offering to do them all wasn’t playing the game. “Look,” he confided, “a lot of us chaps use the excuse that our presence is required at work as our means of extricating ourselves from festive hellholery. Kindly stop spoiling the fun.”
Turn it into sexmas
Source a Chrexit co-conspirator and spend Christmas Day athletically entwined, pausing only for sustenance by way of fried chicken and bubbles. The trick is to ensure that you can tolerate this person not only physically, but for 24 hours of pillow talk, given that there’s only so far one can go with the injunction: “Don’t speak.”
Hide away
My most recent Christmases have been treated as the ultimate sybaritic Sunday, the duvet day that one yearns for but so rarely achieves. I would wake sans alarm clock, bath, assume fresh nightwear, cook my favourite foods (macaroni cheese with roast potatoes, say), down a bottle of wine while reading a novel, watch endless series then re-hit the sack. Even in the act of recalling it, my soul melts a little.
Be smug
The real point of Christmas is, of course, to colonise the moral high ground, and no one does this better than those sacred souls who renounce their own festivities in favour of helping the young, old, poor, homeless, or otherwise deeply patronised. — © Hannah Betts, The Daily Telegraph, London