Happy What?

          We are in the last days of December, “betwixtmas”, a period of time that falls outside the normal definition of ‘week’ or ‘weekend’, a few days that seem to hang around, like Christmas leftovers, waiting to be used up. What to do with them? Not a problem if you are a fervent traditionalist. (Foxhunting, anyone?) Or a lazy-arse who, seeing that everyone seems to have left off hustling for a while, determines to do nothing at all. Or someone who relishes the gift of a big chunk of time to get a head start on a project that has been on the back burner all year. This latter category is where I see myself, though my plan fell apart when we left Fran’s finca in Spain prematurely and, in so doing, left behind the work that was to have occupied me. Alas, with no back-up project planned, I have resorted to renewing my Netflix subscription and, consequently, this last week has been a haze of film and TV, instead of the blur of activity I had anticipated.

          Otherwise, Christmas itself came and went without inconveniencing me in any way – I am a refusenik, insofar as I neither subscribe to the religious myth on which Christmas is based, nor embrace the commercialisation of its reciprocal gift-giving tradition. But I don’t consider it to be all humbug. There are aspects of the festival that appeal to me – bonhomie and decorative lights, for example – it’s just that I find that these pleasures get subsumed by the excesses of display, precarity of expectation and weight of obligation all concentrated in one occasion. I appreciate them best when they are dispersed more evenly throughout the year. Just as I prefer to drink Champagne on a wet Wednesday, when its restorative powers are most needed, so I find it more rewarding to socialise with friends and family frequently and not rely on that ‘special occasion’, one dinner in December.

          Admittedly, this position is easy to maintain when you don’t have children and are not, therefore, obliged to attend nativity plays, doze off at carol concerts, visit Santa grottoes and otherwise indulge their expectations. If I were a parent I suspect I might be more compromising, though I would still work covertly to undermine the foundations of belief and encourage some new thinking. Reassessment of religion-based traditions is overdue, as I see it. As our society has become more culturally inclusive and our nuclear families more genetically diverse, the majority view has dwindled and homogeneity may no longer be taken for granted. The “Merry Christmas!” salutation you get from a stranger might be well-intended but, from another perspective, it is loaded with presumption or, worse, an element of subtle coercion.

          The birth of Jesus was designated as a public holiday back when the church and landowning aristocracy had a stranglehold on power and used it to control the peasants with the dual threats of armed force and the fear of God. The word holiday (deriving from holy day) evokes in me that repressive era. Other cultures, with different faiths, used the same system of control and have a similar legacy. But now that there is greater social mobility and a mingling of cultures within Britain, it seems valid to question why all religion-based celebrations are not granted the status of public holidays. That may seem fair, but it also seems impractical. Perhaps, instead, the system could be revised, so that everyone is allocated a quota of state-funded days off that may be taken at whatever time they wish, whether it be on a saint’s day or a Tuesday. That should satisfy everyone. After all, we all love holidays: it’s just that some of us don’t want religion to determine when we may take them.