Every year my hatred of Christmas grows, and every year I articulate what I hate about it to myself a little bit better, so I thought I'd finally put it into words.
It started off years ago when I thought I still liked Christmas but couldn't quite reconcile the anxiety leading up to it with the stress and fatigue associated with it. One day I simply realised I don't like it at all, that the downsides I felt about it more than outweighed any of the upsides like the big dinner, presents or time with the people I love.
After that I suppose I looked for and latched onto external or socioeconomic reasons not to like it so as to validate my inner cynic, and my dislike of it's only grown since.
First, here's what I hate about my own experience.
My household outlays much more money than it can afford or that I want to. In the early years when we had no money it seemed to leave a smouldering crater in our already torpedoed finances that we'd spend the next six months recovering from, and what did we get out of it to be left in that state? A ton of food that certainly wasn't worth months of tenuous household income, a huge task undoing all the furniture removal and mess to fit everything and everyone in, and yet more stuff cluttering up my life.
We'd sit up all night wrapping presents nobody would care about in two weeks, we'd spend a fortune on enough food to feed three times as many people as we'd host, food and drink that's incredibly bad for us which I never wanted and which is wildly over-catered (enough soft drink to sink a ship, cake, pudding and ice cream crowding decent food out of the freezer, etc).
I'd get a handful of presents that in some other life might be cute and nice, but in this life and in the space we have to live in with all the crap already in it because of our constantly unsettled circumstances, it just ends up more stuff I have to find a corner somewhere to shove out of the way.
Presents not because the giver has had the time and energy to put thought into something that's unique to both them and me – the entire point of a gift from someone, after all (and I don't hold anyone, least of all my wife, in contempt or anger about that because she faces the same unbalanced deficit of energy, time and money every year I do), but presents to fulfil a social obligation we're brainwashed about our entire lives.
I'd move furniture all over the place to accommodate everyone (including between houses in most cases), have no time to work or relax for what feels like weeks on end, and it's all for absolutely no tangible benefit.
But it's for the kids, you might say. Fine, except the way we entertain and raise our kids today and all the material goods we surround them with is utterly obscene. My grandson has so many toys in his life he'd never get to play with them all even if he wanted to, and every time he's at my house he completely ignores his toy box and goes straight for the iPad game he's addicted to. He'd get more out of $200 credit on that game than all the crap he unwraps and leaves everywhere at Christmas.
My wife talks about when her mother was a girl in WWII-era England and how, when they got an orange in their Christmas stocking, it was like getting a Wonka golden ticket because they almost never saw one. They probably got a steel train carriage or a knitted doll too and that was it, and let me promise you they were happier with their fun than kids of today's world whom we drown in oceans of plastic crap.
But it's about the pleasure of unwrapping presents, you might counter. 19th century European royals and nobles got pleasure out of hunting animals across their African colonies too, to near-extinction.
Unfair analogy? For the privilege of all that momentary and ultimately meaningless pleasure of present-opening that gives them the kind of dopamine response retailers use to swindle us every day, we spend enough money to get entire continents out of debt. A news story this year reported that just in WA – the least populated state in the least populated continent on Earth – we were going to spend $833m... over three days.
Extrapolate that out to the amount we spend around the whole world in a single year on all that garbage and it wouldn't only end poverty, it would solve every sociopolitical problem there is, advancing human society to the point we probably wouldn't reach for a century otherwise. Instead, all it does is let Disney, Hasbro and Proctor and Gamble maintain (not even increase – they structure their whole business models around expectations of that revenue) their margins and not fire hundreds of thousands of people, which they have to do to 'correct' their stock price.
And every time I look at him unwrapping some other piece of forgettable plastic he might play with twice before it eventually gets thrown out or given to an op shop in a year after its lain under a bed or outside in the weather, I can't help but wonder at what a minority he's in. He was lucky to be born in a rich Western country where we can afford all that useless shit.
Whatever he opened was probably put together by a kid just like him – maybe several of them – in some third world hellhole where they're chained to a factory lathe churning them out by the millions after already losing a couple of fingers in the machine, are paid barely enough to scrape crumbs from the ground and who wouldn't know a Christmas present if you hit them over the head with it.
But even if we didn't move forwards as a society thanks to the whole enterprise, it would be a start if we didn't move backwards. After it's all over, it takes me a fortnight to get rid of all the Christmas paper and plastic packaging by cramming it into the bins to get rid of it.
If the stuff it contained turned out to be beloved treasures in a child's life that might almost make the abominable scale of waste worth it, but the amount of material left over after all the carnage is mind boggling to behold in a single household – imagine a whole country.
We now have to take our own bags to the supermarket and we've all jumped on board the same hashtag bullshit about banning plastic straws, yet we know very well that more than half of every Christmas present we wrap is the packaging that will be thrown away. Where do we think it'll end up? Google pictures of Pisang Batu river in Jakarta.
'That's not us', you might argue, 'it's unenlightened, backwards, third-world Asians who won't stop polluting their own backyard the way they throw their trash into a river'. So just because the backyard we throw all our clamshell Nerf gun packaging (as well as our computers, phones, cars, food scraps and everything else – nearly a ton of rubbish per person per year, and that's just the average American) is in some other country where laws about polluting their waterways and poisoning their people are so lax, that makes us so much better? The fires and cyclones of global warming won't only hit the technology-strewn rubbish dumps of China and India...
If I leave water in a saucepan overnight to soak the food off the side, I take it outside the next morning and throw it on the garden rather than down the sink. It's a completely useless gesture coming from a single person in a corner of the smallest city on the most sparsely populated land mass on Earth when China, America and all the other economic powerhouses are getting worse at the way they treat the environment.
But I once heard the phrase 'be the change you want to see', and one thing I can't stand in myself is hypocrisy. Of course, tipping two measly litres of water on a plant instead of wasting it when I cram all that plastic into my bins every Christmas like everyone else makes me a complete hypocrite.
There's a socio-cultural dimension to it as well, and it can be summed up in the cheesy old phrase we always associate with the occasion - 'peace on Earth and goodwill to all men'.
At its most simplistic the notion that we'd all stop fighting and killing each other in the endless orgy of power struggle-fuelled violence we keep kidding ourselves we're better than for a single day to drink eggnog and open presents is an insult not just to the sensibility of what it means to be human but – if you want to be politically correct about it – the millions of people who've died because of it.
Dig deeper. The economic system that perpetuates and relies on Christmas being the destructive orgy of consumerism I described above is the reason for that continual power struggle. Today nation states exist to buttress ways of life, and in the West the endpoint of that is the concentration of wealth in an ever shrinking number of corporate-controlled hands. The artefacts our political and economic systems rely on – Frozen DVDs just as much as oil – come to us through a very entrenched industrial infrastructure, some of which exists in unstable parts of the world.
And as governments over the last century have proven, they'll act as outsourced police forces to maintain the supply stability of those artefacts to prop our economic systems aloft. Decades-long wars and occupations in the Middle East not to free or protect the people but assure the continued flow of oil is only the most visible example. For ones you've barely heard about search online for Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Cochabamba Water War and many other examples like them.
None of that political force or violence committed by and on behalf of financial interests is going to stop for Christmas, because it's by its virtue that Christmas take the form we know, with all the shopping centre Santas, snow spray painted in shop windows, turkey with all the trimmings, etc etc.
But I've got political again. Take me to task on spending time with your family. I won't even talk about how many people are forced to spend time with people they don't even really like and only see on Christmas because it's the done thing – a million memes and social media jokes about Christmas Day fights cover that more than adequately.
Let's suppose you're spending time with family you really love and want to be around and you only get to see them on Christmas (or some similar special occasion). You know all the studies about how we're destroying our health through constant overwork as well as I do, and it's not just distant relatives we only see on Christmas who suffer – our spouses and children are emotionally stunted and damaged because of it.
Our society (the same one that invades foreign countries to protect oil interests – at the risk of getting political again) normalises working yourself stupid until you have an ulcer or heart attack, and we're all headed for the same endpoint where we realise one day that our wife/husband/partner doesn't know us any more and that our children have been raised by Playstations and phones, faultlessly trained to understand that we don't have time for them.
If you look forward to seeing certain family (or just people you love – family takes many forms) on Christmas, you're probably not seeing them enough to begin with. Why wait until one day of the year to make the effort? As it is it's the worst day to socialise with people because you'll be so stressed and harried cooking three times as much food as they'll need on time and drowning in all the wrapping paper and plastic strewn around the perfect house you just spent three weeks decorating and that nobody even looks twice at (because all they're interested in is eating all the food you bankrupted yourself to pay for and what they'll get in their presents)?
Throw in all the conspiracy theories about how Coca Cola invented the modern visual iteration of Santa Claus and how corporations have conflated certain holidays to shove down our throats because of the money to be made (St Patricks' Day is only advertised by pubs, after all, and only confectionary companies and soft toy factories make extra money at Easter) – most of which are true – and the whole thing is an abomination.
