Unchristmas Me Without Merriment

Opinion
Christopher Nagle
December 26, 2009

I am trying to avoid Christmas. No, it is more than that. I am boycotting it. I no longer want to continue to allow myself to be dragged into a shopping festival that celebrates pointless excess spending and gormandizing. It would be nice to celebrate the Christian Christmas, but I am not a Christian, so that isn't open to me either.

Therefore, I am doing New Year. This is a day of resolutions and commitments for the coming year and actively doing something about them on day one. It is a day to re-affirm one' s values, beliefs, familial ties and friendships; to extol the virtues that make life sustainable and worth living.

Of course Christmas has traditionally been about that too, but my concern is that it is being drowned in increasingly grotesque propaganda and frenzied marketing pressure. By adopting the New Year one is at least for the time being, disconnecting from that framework and establishing other kinds of values.

The final straw for this was the Copenhagen failure. It suddenly became crystal clear that there is virtually nothing we can do to stop a generalised and worsening pattern of environmental catastrophe progressively hitting us until it puts us out of action. I can no longer fend off the fear of what is going to happen to my children and grand-children.

I think we all going to be forced to rethink the way we live our lives. I don't suggest that this will necessarily ameliorate what is coming, but it may teach us to become more resilient and frugal within ourselves and less demanding of others and the precious, wounded and now terribly fragile world we occupy.

I know this sounds unseasonably dismal and we should be sharing warm fuzzies, but I am afraid I am just not seeing much to be warmly fuzzy about. Some might say that in those circumstances, perhaps silence would be better, because of the risk of being seen as a humorless killjoy and party pooper. Well, I'll wear that. I have been putting off saying this and taking the plunge for too long. I have had Christmas in my sights for at least a decade, kept silent, went along with it and I have had enough.

So I am not wishing you or anyone else a Merry Christmas. All I can offer is a very sober and low key hope that 2010 will not be yet another year that the locusts ate. I am not holding my breath, but hope, even a poor sort of hope, is a lifebuoy to love and laughter, and a sticking point for one's courage to do what must be done in the year ahead.

And as to Father Christmas: I hope his elves go and get real jobs planting forests on the now receding snow lines of the arctic; that his reindeer get their real job back by replacing snowmobiles; and the fat slob himself gets stuck in one of his own industrial chimneys and chokes on the soot!