So have you got your Christmas morning plans sorted? Will you be getting up at five to entomb some giant, ominous-looking fowl in the oven (woken several hours earlier by a child or two vibrating with impatience, possibly)? Or are you piling bags, pets and presents into the car for a multi-centre, multi-meal tour of your relations, all of whom feel hard done by that you aren’t staying longer and will take every opportunity to make that clear? Perhaps you’ll be taking a few snatched moments to meditate or beg the universe for forbearance and serenity as you prepare to host the most explosively mismatched group of people to share a space since the cast of Big Brother 11?
I’ve done most of that, including taking an overnight Christmas Eve ferry to get us where we needed to be for Christmas morning (the onboard buffet was surprisingly festive). It’s a lot, isn’t it? In a YouGov poll in 2019, a quarter of people said Christmas made their mental health worse; 51% of women and 35% of men said it made them feel stressed. The only surprising thing about that for me is how low that is; I’d be willing to bet the subsequent years of pandemic and cost-of-living anxieties have increased our festive stress.
So here’s a suggestion: have you considered doing less? Or even nothing? That’s my Christmas. We’re going rogue this year with a trip to see our elder son who is working in the US, but in recent years, my 25 Decembers have morphed into a tranquil, low-key, stay-at-home nonevent. I have a lie-in (at 19 and 21, my sons no longer rise at 5am, or even 10am), a coffee and a potter. I exchange desultory WhatsApps with my best friend, who also does nothing for Christmas, about what snacks we’re looking forward to, read by the fire, then eventually consider whether it’s time for a bagel and a glass of champagne. When the kids emerge, they open a couple of presents (it depends on the year whether they’ve remembered to get us anything; we don’t care if they haven’t). We eventually eat, but it isn’t a big event: I usually do something very easy and non-traditional – one year curry; another tacos – and with our various dietary foibles, we probably won’t even eat the same thing. We always watch a ton of TV, of course. It’s an exhalation of a time; a moment of heavenly peace.
The run-up is similarly calm. Honestly, my only moment of preparatory Christmas anxiety comes at the start of December when I spend a few hours agonising over which panettone to buy, a decision I imbue with disproportionate significance given that most panettone taste identical. Apart from that, preparations are limited to nonexistent. We used to have a potted Christmas tree we rescued from B&Q car park one Christmas Eve, but the drought killed it and even though I do actually love baubles, I don’t know whether we’ll get another: more likely I’ll stick my favourite decorations on the dresser with a string of lights and a couple of bits of holly and call it a day. I delete the Ocado emails about booking slots instantly and refuse to give in to the collective food shopping psychosis that blinds us to the fact that the shops close for only one day, guys – 24 hours! If that! The corner shop is probably open if you’re desperate! And even if it’s not, is it really going to be a disaster if you run out of anything except loo roll? There’s no household cleaning to be done, because no one is coming over – well, my stepfather and sister and one of my good friends might drop in at some point for a cup of tea or a drink, but they’re all in that category of people you don’t need to make an effort for.
Presents? Yeah, not really. It’s partly planetary guilt – a queasy sense that I have no business buying more stuff – and the cost of living doesn’t help: in a recent survey one in three British adults said they’d be cutting back on spending this year.
It’s also about my phase of life: my kids’ generation of the family are all grown up and don’t really need much fuss, while our parents are all deep into their Swedish death cleaning, busily shedding their possessions, not accumulating. My stepfather looks genuinely upset when someone gives him a gift and cannot know peace until he’s regifted it; he turned up hopefully trying to palm off a box of chocolates on me only last week. I’ll get a few bits for my sons, though they’d both much rather I just gave them cash, and I think this might even be the year I stop giving the youngest his traditional “Extraordinary Chickens” calendar: he’s been at university for the past two years and inexplicably left it behind. My husband and I stopped giving each other Christmas gifts years ago – it’s an expensive time of year and it just felt like another stressful chore. We’ve extended this amnesty to my delighted stepfather who wanted nothing more than to be released from his annual trudge around the shops (now he makes Christmas cakes for people he would have given presents previously; they’re delicious).
What I’m saying is I’ve opted out of Christmas, I suppose. It’s a little bit like this year’s Marks & Spencer Christmas ad, in which celebrities ditch the traditions they hate: Tan France chucking the Monopoly board out of the window, Hannah Waddingham shredding paper crowns and Sophie Ellis-Bextor torching her unwritten Christmas cards. I’ve pared Christmas down to the bits I want, it’s just that in my case that’s hardly anything. At some point in the past few years, I realised that none of this was actually obligatory, and if I didn’t enjoy it, the sky wouldn’t fall in if I just didn’t bother.
I know when that thought started to take root, actually; it was on the first Covid Christmas. With tight rules on household mixing, my sister stuck at home in Paris and my sons lounging at home in their pyjamas, my husband and I took bagels and smoked salmon round to my stepfather’s house and sat outside, coats on, with a glass of champagne. We had a nice chat for half an hour or so, then we went home. The rest of the day was a pleasant blur of TV, snacks and naps. So many people were bereft that year, far from family and unable to enjoy their usual celebrations; guiltily, furtively, I loved it. There was no going back.
I realise this could sound joyless; maybe it does. There are definitely a couple of hours on Christmas Day that can feel anticlimactic and underwhelming, especially when everyone is posting pictures of massive gatherings and uproarious meals; the fraught but happy chaos of family. But we’re a household of people who don’t much enjoy a fuss and quietly doing our own thing seems to work, at least for now. I make an effort to spend a bit of time with the people I love but don’t live with during the wider season when I can – I enjoy their company more when we’re not meeting up in the gravy-scented pressure cooker of Christmas Day.
Or worse, maybe it sounds smug? I’m not, honestly: I’m an anxious introvert who used to make everyone miserable by being rigid and tense and on a hair trigger for days; I’m just letting us all off that hook. But yes, Christmas is a time of tangled, complicated feelings of love and responsibility and traditions freighted with meaning. It’s a time when absences can really ache: I know that. My mother used to throw a wonderful Christmas, unerringly buying us all thoughtful presents that felt like a treat, making her Christmas Eve seafood chowder, pouring drinks at the perfect moment, insisting we all walk to the cathedral on Christmas morning to “see the baby Jesus” they put in the manger. When she died, we didn’t have the heart to do any of it and Christmas felt wrong for years. “Do only what you love”, the M&S ad says, but if something really matters for people you love, you can’t just deprive them of it. I couldn’t have called the whole thing off when my sons were younger and when we spend the day with my husband’s French family every few years, it’s a whole other long and extremely food-centred story. I wonder, too, if this is a temporary Christmas truce in my life: perhaps one day my sons will have kids and I’ll be thrilled to provide the full festive hoopla?
But if there’s anything to be taken from my current tiny, quiet Christmases, I think it’s that this day is supposed to be pleasurable, for everyone. If there’s something that really saps the joy for you, could you possibly give yourself permission to ditch it next year? “Don’t do something you hate” isn’t as catchy as “Do only what you love”, but it might just be the secret to a happier Christmas.
