No to Noel: Why Christmas is like pissing in a urinal

My disillusion with Christmas was a relatively sudden process. Within the space of one or two Christmases it went from being an exciting, comfortable, looked-forward-to occasion to being, frankly, a pain in the arse. Now, I inwardly cringe every year from about mid-November, when the first garish displays appear in the shop and you start to hear Rudolph the sodding Red-nosed Reindeer everywhere you go.

Now, I know what you’re thinking – bah humbug! What a miserable bugger I must be, whinging about the time of peace to the world and goodwill to all men. However, I maintain that there a number of entirely valid reasons to hate Christmas that go beyond the usual lazy soul-searching about its commercialisation.

My first and probably biggest problem with Christmas is the way it introduces an air of forced and sometimes inappropriate jollity to everything. At Christmas, everyone is expected to have a good time, be cheerful and enjoy themselves. This atmosphere of expectation kills any prospect of fun for me. Humour, joy and tenderness will never result if you try to force them – they “simply occur”, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde. It’s a bit like trying to piss in a gents’ toilet. The fact that the blokes at the neighbouring urinals are dimly aware of whether you are successfully having a slash or not makes actually performing the act remarkably difficult, as most men who are not blithely unselfaware morons will have noticed.

That the expectation of performance makes performance all the more difficult is not a blindingly original observation. However, it deserves to be pointed out that this problem is compounded in the case of Christmas by the stubborn facts of reality. The vicissitudes of life are unpredictable, and there is no way of guaranteeing that Christmas will not occur at a difficult or challenging time, when all of the plastic, manufactured cheeriness and ‘goodwill’ chafes particularly painfully. Anyone who has had a close family member or friend die near Christmas will testify to this. I remember attending the funeral of a friend held in early January who died around Christmas time. The timing lent it a particularly plaintive and miserable quality. When one knows that one is expected to be happy and cheerful but feels merely despair, the contrast makes the unhappiness all the more difficult to bear.

I remember this particularly during the Christmas that immediately followed my parents’ divorce. My mother had taken the divorce and its circumstances extremely (and understandably) badly. The isolation that she felt that Christmas made enjoying Christmas impossible. What made it all the worse was that she felt guilty about not being cheerful for me, which in turn made her despair even more. It didn’t do much for my levels of merriment either.

There are other reasons to dislike Christmas. Firstly, most heathens like me will feel vaguely bemused by the fact that, although Christmas is a Christian festival, it is culturally engrained that everyone will celebrate it regardless of their actual beliefs. I do not believe that Christ is our saviour who will absolve our sins, and I do not set any store at all by the occasion of the (supposed) anniversary of his birth. However, if I ignored it completely – if I never bought anyone presents, pretended that 25th December is just another day – I would be seen as acting very strangely indeed. Some smart-alecs have in the past suggested to me that as a consistent atheist, I should do just this and ignore Christmas, not even participating in any of its semi-secular rituals like the tree, Christmas pudding or presents. Glib and consistent though this argument is, it is clearly impossible to altogether avoid Christmas within the context of British society and existing social relationships without making life fairly difficult for oneself and probably offending some people whom one loves. So, most atheists have to half-heartedly go through the motions and pretend that Christmas has some significance to avoid greater inconveniences, or else unashamedly confess that Christmas is just a thinly-veiled excuse for everyone to eat and drink too much, which makes the whole thing a very shallow and faintly depressing affair. As for those of other faiths, I expect that Christmas for them must be a pretty tricky affair in Britain, since any small Hindu or Muslim child is going to be naturally baffled, given their likely lack of appreciation of the finer points of religious division, as to why almost all of their peers are receiving presents and having a good time when they are not

Furthermore, Christmas seems to illustrate human folly and cruelty particularly sharply. It is meant to be a time of good-will and peace, when existing wars or injustices temporarily pause. The guns on the Western Front cease, the homeless are treated in a slightly more human way for a day, and so on. Surely, however, all this does is illustrate how absurd and unforgivable human social and political organisation is for the rest of the year? If it takes Christmas for people to stop butchering each other or for people to give a second thought to the desperate, the homeless, and the poor, then what does that say about most people? It seems self-evident to me that all human beings have a duty to act with decency consistently, not merely because they happen to remember, for one day a year, that morality, you know, actually exists. It’s almost as if man’s inhumanity to man is fine, so long as one has the good manners to refrain for a few days around the time when Christ was supposedly born, it being a little gratuitous to juxtapose the (supposed) Christian message of loving kindness so very blatantly with the hypocrisies of our existing societies.

In short, Christmas seems to me to illustrate the painful contradictions of our culture in a stark way. The cheerful expect those with fairly valid reasons to be miserable to suddenly snap out it. Non-Christians have little choice but to adapt and pay lip-service to the celebration of something that they do not believe in, or risk making themselves unpopular or hurting others’ feelings. Those who endorse war and poverty cry crocodile tears for a day over the injustices they do nothing to ameliorate, and a lot to prolong, the other 364 days a year.

Please, fast-forward me to January now...