How is it that Australia has become a country without a Christian majority and yet we voluntarily outstrip ourselves year on year with the scale of our Christmas festival. Friends, I think we’re in it for the good time.
The 2022 census revealed religious affiliation in Australia is in sharp decline. In 1901, the year of federation, 96.1% of Australians identified as Christian, but today only 43.9% do. Nearly 40% told the census they had no religious affiliation at all. In South Australia, there are now more people with “no religion” than Christians, and in Tasmania, non-believers are the majority.
It’s not just that we structure our school terms and end-of-year holidays in the workplace around the public holiday of 25 December; we structure our finances around it, too. In 2022, Australians funnelled an eye-watering $74.5bn to pre-Christmas spending. In the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, as recently as November experts were suggesting this Christmas we’ll beat it – and this is retail spending too, not just the end-of-year parties and work wrap-up drinks.
The festival that Christians adopted as the celebration of the birth of baby Jesus may indeed include present-sharing to represent the gifts of the wise men to the newborn messiah. But other traditions incorporated into Christmas come from the pre-Christian Germanic celebration of midwinter known as “Yule”. Mistletoe rituals were taken from the Druids and decorating “Saturnalia” trees is likely borrowed from the Romans. The rituals that define Christmas have always been syncretic, but maybe because we’ve had to adapt to a blazing hot summer while our northern cousins get jolly about snow, or because our evolved multiculturalism is now complex even at the household level, Australian Christmas has become the expression of a secular syncretism, superpowered. (Although I wish the story of Santa reanimating murdered children who’d been stuffed in barrels and pickled got a bigger go – it is amazing.)
I engaged a deep scientific analysis of, uh, asking my various social media communities of how Australians celebrate the Christmas holiday. Every answer contained unique variations. There are families whose feasts begin with morning seafood, others who commit to the full British lunch table of hot meat, even in the heat. Some families go to restaurants and suit themselves. “Orphans’ Christmases” are parties for chosen families, and some friends stage multi-day queer celebrations, including group showings of queer films that are obliged to contain one Christmas scene. Atheists decorate trees, environmentalists run Kris Kringles to recycle old gifts without waste. One family told me they long every year for a “Christmas lasagna”. Elise Esther Hearst’s very funny play A Very Jewish Christmas Carol by the Melbourne Theatre Company explores the traditions of a modern Australian Jewish Hanukkah/Christmas combination. In our household, we watch Die Hard every Christmas Eve and I always push for a group screening of The Shining, the definitive Christmas movie.
There’s a reason why Tim Minchin’s White Wine in the Sun has become an Australian Christmas anthem. It speaks to how we share the experience of doing our most fun things at the same time, even if those things are so personalised and different. I was struck by the number of people who told me they were often on their own at Christmas and happily indulged in their solitude – reading novels, listening to podcasts and music, maybe eating chocolates in the bath.
Whether it’s sipping down an expensive claret, taking a long solo walk through a deserted city, a beach picnic, an evening meal with the whole clan in matching pyjamas, the annual family cricket game or vegan feasts, what defines Australian Christmas is the ritual re-performance of those things that simply bring most happiness to the people doing them. These rituals change as what makes us happy changes too, and as our households, families and communities also change, losing members and gaining them.
Is this a betrayal of religious principle? Joy as “an expression of the divine” is a theme running through Christianity to Taoism – and you don’t need to believe in God for lasagna to remind you that the universe is glorious.
Even so, every year, the political hard right tries to insist on the existence of a “war on Christmas” where godless communists try to destroy Christian CivilisationTM by, I dunno, shooting Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer in the face every time someone says “happy holidays”. This is more or less the subject of a Santa-hat-themed meme from Pauline Hanson.
Turns out there is a reason for the season – and I feel sorry for anyone for whom Australia’s great and diverse, personalised and shared secular joy remains invisible. To inelegantly paraphrase EM Forster: “It’s happy holidays here, Pauline – but you can call it ‘Christmas’ if it makes you less unhappy.”
The happiest of holidays, and to you all.
• Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist
