It’s Not Christmas Without a Mild Breakdown

Notes On: Magic, Mess and Mince Pies

“December. This heart full of tears and of night.” – Albert Camus

“The sadness comes crashing like a brick through the window / and it’s Christmas, so no one can fix it” – Phoebe Bridgers, Christmas Song

"It's Christmas Eve and we are going to go celebrate being young and being alive" – Nancy Meyers, The Holiday

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The thing no one ever wants to say about Christmas is that it’s a tumble of contradictions. I realised this for the first time at the age of twelve, somewhere between Bristol and Swindon, on the M4, as my dad drove me six hours up the motorway on Boxing Day. I was curled in the back of the car, swaddled beneath a duvet. We’d just stopped at a petrol station. I remember this because he’d bought a packet of minstrels for us to share, and I was turning one over with my tongue as I thought very hard about a question he’d just asked me about Christmas.

This is the kind of dad he was – and is. The kind to spend an entire Boxing Day taking his child to a chamber music course to play Beethoven, Schubert and (although he didn’t know this part) spin the bottle, for a week. The kind to ask questions instead of putting on the radio. The kind who bought minstrels because I loved them. We were talking about the origins of Christmas; about what the gift giving part was all about. He said: “well, what do you think it’s about?”, his eyes flicking to mine through the rearview mirror. I said: “It’s kind of narcissistic celebration, isn’t it? Everyone gets presents for other people, but really they’re thinking about what they’re going to receive themselves – or how they’re going to be praised for getting a really good present for someone else.” Perplexingly, he found this hilarious. So hilarious that he still brings it up, at least once a year. In fact, I wouldn’t even remember that Boxing Day trip at all, if it weren’t for the stories he’s told about it since: “A narcissistic celebration!” He says, giggling. “It’s just so true, but no adult would ever say it.” He didn’t stop laughing until after Swindon.

At different points in my life, I’ve viewed Christmas through very different lenses. At twelve, clearly, I was cynical. At sixteen, I was in love for the first time, and the whole season felt as though it was dipped in magic. At eighteen, I was sick, and anything festive made me feel worse. At twenty-five, I was in love again, and this time everything was beautiful and soft and joyful, with a hint of reality seeping in at the edges like a vignette. At twenty-seven, my dad was undergoing chemo, and the day blended into all those surrounding it, an onslaught of grey.

images from Pinterest

But back to the contradictions. The reason I’ve seen Christmas through so many different lenses, at different ages, is because it’s full of incongruity. To me, one of the most beautiful things in the world is the sight of a flickering Christmas tree from a dark street. It holds so much: beauty, love, hope, the promise of something to come. But ultimately, a tree can only survive inside for so long. Its beauty lies – as in so many things in this life – in its transience.

The same could be said of the entire Christmas period: the glittering lights, the love and joy and hope spread like the wings of a dove, sprinkling down on ‘one and all’ as we sit in living rooms and laugh and listen to jingling music and drink warm wine. And at the same time? Flu season. Exhaustion. Hospitals without enough beds. Loneliness spreading through limbs like an ache. Relatives in care homes who don’t remember your name. The cost of turning on the heating. The cost of gifts. The cost, the cost, the cost. And on top of it all? The expectation of happiness. That all-pervasive supposition of Holiday Cheer: carols and stockings and ribbons and elaborate fireside stories told in pubs.

Picture-perfect, shiny family. Holiday peppermint candy. Christmas-Advert-Perfection.*

Nora Ephron said it best:

“Christmas is a time when you look at your life through a magnifying glass, and whatever you don't have feels overwhelming.”

It’s true: if you’re in love, or with family, or financially and psychologically stable, Christmas can be incredibly beautiful. But if you don’t have those things? It can feel, sometimes, like a punishment.

And then there’s the in-between. Panic buying socks for your brother-in-law on Christmas Eve because you forgot to get him anything. The Big Food Shop. Turning the Christmas tree lights off every night. Greeting long-distant cousins with awkward smiles. Small talk. So much small talk. Sore throats. Rainy walks in squelching trainers. Squabbling with your siblings over things that don’t matter (what to eat for lunch, what to watch on the TV) and things that do (politics, and pop culture’s influence over it).

Millions of mothers all over the world, staying up late to wrap the presents. All that invisible labour to create a sense of magic. Because no – I don’t think Christmas was more magical, when we were children. I think it’s just that, as adults, we have to create the magic. We’re in charge of it: of choosing the presents and dusting the ornaments and potting the tree and sorting out all the wiring for the lights. And doesn’t that just feel like a lot of effort, sometimes? Writing hundreds of cards, slipping them through letterboxes. Tying ribbons. Choosing the right sort of crackers, even as you know they’ll go straight in the bin. Because here’s another contradiction: magic is formed not by the flit of a wand, but by many, many hours of thoughtful, careful work.

And yet.

We still do it. We wrap the presents; we decorate the tree. We summon the magic into being, even if just for a moment. And this is one of the things I love so much about humanity: How we celebrate, just to celebrate.

image from Pinterest

We have birthdays just as an excuse to honour each of our unique, remarkable existence on this earth. We have leaving drinks and weddings and funerals and christenings and a myriad of other customary moments, baked into each and every year, to come together and honour simply how wonderful it is to be alive in this world, despite – or perhaps in spite of – having no idea why we’re all here.*

Or maybe (and I’m not sure about this, it’s a working theory), maybe we celebrate so much, and with such energy, simply because we know that it’ll all come to an end, at some point. That although we live such separate lives, in different corners of the world, we have one thing in common: We know that this life will not last forever.

I’ve just finished reading Entitlement by Rumaan Alam. I enjoyed it, but I’m not going to write about it here, other than to say that I was caught by one simple statement, made by a character in old age, a character likely to die at some point in the near(ish) future. He said (or, rather, thought): “Death [makes] life worth living.”

I think this is true. Just as the dark informs the light and music exists in symbiosis with silence, so too does life demand celebration, existing as it does within the foregone conclusion of death. And isn’t there a certain magic to that? Our human desire – our need – to turn something devastating into something worth celebrating? Something with balloons or fairy lights or both? Something gift-wrapped with care? I think so.

Christmas may well be a tangled mess of contradictions. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t magical. It just means that the magic has been tended to by careful hands. It’s homegrown. Hard-won over late nights, and hours spent in supermarket aisles or slow-roasting carrots. It’s organic magic. Magic without the pesticides. Without the tinsel, or the microplastics. Magic without the expectation.

image from Pinterest

Which is all to say: It doesn’t have to be picture-perfect, this Christmas. It doesn’t have to culminate in a New Year’s kiss to the swelling sounds of a song you barely know the words to. It doesn’t have to be without conflict, or without tiredness, or without tears.

This life is messy because we’re messy. Christmas is a mess of contradictions because we’re a mess of contradictions. The difficulty comes, often, when we try and turn something messy into something perfect. So: Let the mess be messy. Let the tears flow. Let the mince pies go cold. This life is short; it’s time to celebrate it, in that chaotic glorious bright funny curious LOUD way we humans like to celebrate.

So have a mince pie and a baby Guinness or three, raise your hands to the sky, text someone you love them, eat your favourite foods every single day, and allow yourself to really live over the next few weeks. We only live once, after all.

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At twelve, I was cynical about Christmas. At sixteen, I was in love. At twenty-seven, I was indifferent. And at twenty-nine? I’m just so grateful that we all have an excuse to come together and celebrate the fact that we are alive, and well, and that this kind of love exists in the world. To create our own snow-globe-like reality. Even if it is just for a day.

image from Pinterest

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P. P. S. I have an exciting announcement coming in the new year. Paid subs will get clues as to what this might be, every Sunday over the next few weeks. The first person to guess it gets a free yearly membership for a YEAR (!!) Good luck.

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*Footnote 1

This is a Taylor Swift quote. But it’s one of the only ‘happy’ Christmas lyrics she has. Most of them are really quite depressing. (“I attend Christmas parties from outside” comes to mind, as does “the holidays linger like bad perfume”). All those contradictions? She gets it.

*Footnote 2

I’m talking about those who aren’t religious, simply because that’s my experience. Of course, those who are religious celebrate these moments because of their religion.