As most people know, Christmas has got virtually nothing to do with Christianity. In the early days of the Church, the fledgling religion faced competition from all sides, and one of their biggest problems was trying to combat paganism and other faiths, and particularly to subdue their long-established festivals and religious days. The 25th of December was one of these, an important pagan celebration known as the Festival of the Unvanquished Sun, the Roman god Sol Invictus, and rather than try to compete with it, the early Church simply hijacked it, decreeing in the mid-fourth century that that day was the birthdate of Jesus Christ, despite the complete absence of the slightest historical or any other evidence to support it.
That’s the historical reality, if you like, but you could also argue that no matter what the truth is of the founder of the Christian religion, Christmas today has got virtually nothing to do with Christianity, albeit for entirely different reasons. It’s been turned into an almost entirely commercial event, with the first offers for the festive season appearing in the shops as early as October, and sometimes even in August and September. According to one statistic I saw – and like most statistics it is highly suspect – as much as thirty per cent of the British population will incur significant debts that they cannot afford to repay over this holiday season, because of the perceived need to buy presents for relatives that they otherwise wouldn’t see, and might even dislike, and to purchase prodigious quantities of food which will force everyone to subsist on a diet that consists almost entirely of various iterations of turkey for the weeks following the holiday.
The subject of presents has always caused us a certain amount of amusement. My late uncle-in-law – in other words, my wife’s uncle – invariably used to buy us a box of biscuits, so the only thing we don’t know before we opened the present was exactly which brand he’d selected that year. We never really knew why he bothered wrapping it. As a gift, it would make more sense if we ate biscuits, but we don’t. We normally bought him a bottle of Scotch, which was equally predictable, and easy, and we didn’t wrap it.
The problem comes when trying to buy presents for people that you don’t know, new relatives by marriage or something, and who you might only have met once or twice in the past. Just what do you buy for a fifty-year-old man who you’ve met once? You don’t necessarily know if he drinks or smokes or has some other, less socially acceptable, vice that you could cater for, and you probably have no idea what he watches on TV or the cinema, or listens to in the car, so you can’t even buy him a DVD film or a CD. And what about a fifteen-year-old boy? Actually, that might be easier. Twenty fags, a dodgy DVD and half a bottle of Scotch would probably hit the spot, no matter what his parents might think.
At least for the two of us it’s a lot easier. This year, just like last year, and the year before, and the year before that, and so on, my wife and I did exactly the same thing. We told everybody we could think of that we were neither giving presents nor expecting any. Then we sent a decent slice of money to a local charity for homeless and distressed people on the reasonable grounds that everybody we numbered among our family and friends already had a lot more stuff than they needed and we knew there were people out there who were really struggling and who would appreciate at least getting a decent meal and somewhere warm to enjoy it.
And we bought each other neither a present nor a card. Really, really easy. Then once the madness of the post-Christmas sales has eased somewhat, we will go out and if we see something we fancy, we’ll buy it for ourselves. That way, we can be absolutely certain that at least one of the Christmas presents we receive will be something we actually want, even if three days after Christmas we end up taking everything else that’s turned up round to the nearest charity shop in a big bag.
In fact, I have a feeling we might have stumbled upon the perfect way to buy Christmas presents: buy absolutely nothing for anybody else, and just buy yourself whatever it is you want. And, of course, tell all your friends and relatives to do exactly the same, because for me, personally, there’s a limit to the number of tins of biscuits and pairs of amusing socks that I can cope with.
Having said all that, I do hope everybody had a merry Christmas and a happy New Year, despite the madness of Boris and the continuing threat of Covid. And don’t forget your resolutions for 2022.
