In 1946, buoyed by post-War optimism, the World Health Organisation adopted a famous definition. Health, it declared, was more than the mere absence of disease or infirmity, it was ‘a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being’. A beautiful and tyrannical idea, sentimentally idealistic and setting an impossible standard for human lives. In these qualities of cheerful and unreasonable despotism, it resembles Christmas.
Our wish to make kids happy at Christmas turns us into untiring fifth columnists of festive tyranny
On the first of November, collecting my cardboard cup of coffee in Costa, I noticed it was decorated with a festive scene. I scowled, which comes naturally, but felt a small and undignified flutter of pleasure. Nothing natural about that, only the insidious victory of years of Christmas tyranny over my cold dark heart, like mistletoe overwhelming an oak. In mid-November, in the pub with friends, we bitched to each other about the tinsel and baubles. By the end of the month, surrounded by an even gaudier display of the same, this time with tree, we admitted we were pleased by the festive decorations. Perhaps it helped that we were in the Hind’s Head in Bray, and due at the Waterside Inn the next night. Even a flint-hearted Scrooge can be bought, and Soufflé Suissesse à la truffe was on the Christmas menu.
Tyranny, initially, implied a ruler one had not chosen, not an ungenerous or harsh style of rule. Christmas cheer is a tyrant we cannot help but kick against, but which we mostly welcome all the same. Picking up that first Christmas-themed coffee cup made me spot my ambivalence. I used to be stricter in my views, but then, in late November, I felt a treacherous twinge of anticipation. I seem to have become softer with age, and I fear I may have changed for the better.
I ordered a goose and a turkey and a ham weeks before Christmas this year, telling myself that such habits meant no change in heart – they were only the forward thinking required of a paterfamilias fortunate to have reached the stage in life when the cost of such items gave him no pause. I have never, it is true, owned a Christmas jumper, but that’s not because I possess taste but rather that I am absent of all sartorial interest. Most of my jumpers, my wife points out, are sufficiently frayed to make me look like a vagrant. I have two without holes which, now I come to think of it, were given to me by my daughter, for Christmas.
Movies and songs written specifically for Christmas tend to be dreadful – which does not, I can’t help admitting, stop them being enjoyable. I remember as a medical student, attached to a hospice to learn palliative care, being told that the key to making dying people happy was to get them to lower their expectations. He even drew a graph, illustrating the Mr Micawber-like idea that, so long as life was better than you hoped, you’d be cheerful. I remember thinking it a dismal notion. At that age I was much enamoured with Cyrano de Bergerac, and his notion that fights were more honourable for being against overwhelming odds, and utterly hopeless.
Years later, in my mother’s final spring, she took great pleasure in being wheeled outside for a few minutes to admire the bulbs. She had a gift for enjoying what was at hand, without tormenting herself by the absence of what was not. She was also, now I come to think of it, an unapologetic and sentimental celebrant of Christmas. Was she like that before she had children? I wonder, for kids are who Christmas is really for. Our wish to make them happy turns us all into untiring fifth columnists of festive tyranny.
To be sophisticated, trees should be sparingly dressed in an understated palette. As a child I deemed this cowardice, and regarded visible pine needles as a defeat. The proper purpose of a tree was to support masses of tinsel, in exuberant and preferably gaudy colours. I have never, somehow, outgrown this conviction.
Elegantly decorated trees leave me cold; I want no part of their beauty, perhaps because I sense that their sort of beauty wants no part of me. True life is not elegant. A host of baubles, with annual additions from each child and steady subtractions by pets, small hands, and clumsy parents, remains my ideal.
All tyrannies need their apologists. As Christmas 1838 approached, Charles Darwin weighed up marriage. He made lists of pros and cons, as if happiness were a solvable equation, before abandoning his efforts. Marriage, he concluded, was one of those parts of life that cannot be dodged without dodging life itself. ‘Cheer up,’ he wrote to himself, ‘there is many a happy slave.’
We are born into a world with traditions, and happiness often lies in accepting their unelected rule. Christmas is a tyranny to which my poverty of taste, and not my will, consents. So complete is its victory that my annual surrender – excuse me while I rescue that bauble from the cat and stand up another bottle of port – gives me joy.
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