It was in the middle of November that I snapped.
I had been doing my best to shut out the obnoxious flood of Christmas advertising. Television ads muted, garlanded displays bypassed and bright red ad copy ignored. It was the desperate, false cheer aimed at encouraging yuletide commerce (since Halloween commerce was now moot).
Then, I wandered into the Atlantic Superstore on November 15, heard “Jingle Bells” over the PA system and that was the moment. Any Christmas joy that had a hope of lingering in my heart was displaced by resentment.
I asked at the customer service desk about this practice of playing Christmas music more than six weeks before the actual holiday takes place. The helpful staffer told me they’d been instructed by head office to play the music from November 1st, but had resisted for a couple of weeks before the hammer came down.
I feel for them, those employees. As awful as it is for me, I only pass through. I don’t have to spend eight hours a day watching out for, and trying not to cry because “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.”
I can’t deny it. The joy of Christmas has been taken from me by the economics of Christmas. By the time December 25 is here, I’m so sick of the corporate nonsense, I can hear Jacob Marley’s ghostly chains clanging in my ears. Bah, humbug indeed.
Add to that the pressures to provide presents: get that sweater for Auntie Jean, new toy for little Max and what…what… WHAT for Dad?! Traditions can become obligations. It’s exhausting.
What do people who have no connection to Christmas do to get through this stretch? And how do they rise above the din of the relentless Christmas jingles?
Sageev Oore describes himself as having a Jewish background but doesn’t subscribe to organized worship. A professional musician and pianist in local jazz outfit Gypsophilia and with dance/performance group Verve Mwendo, he finds most Christmas music “a sensory offense”—the aural equivalent of pungent perfume counters. “It’s awful. You have to walk through it to get to the rest of the store.”
Without direct personal relevance of Christianity’s big birthday in his life, he easily sees stress the holiday puts on people.
“It feels a little hard to watch from the outside,” says Oore. “Everyone is trapped in these ideas of what they’re supposed to do. I’ve never been a fan of doing things on someone else’s calendar…everybody is telling me this is the time of the year to buy things. But didn’t it start off with it’s OK to not have money?”
I asked Seán Kennedy, an assistant professor of English and coordinator of the Irish Studies program at SMU, who grew up in Killarney, about Christmas in Ireland, and what it’s like being apart from it.
“Ireland has been significantly colonized by capitalism and that’s part of the reason I swerve away,” says Kennedy, who hasn’t gone home in December in some time. He says he likes the lightness of being here in Halifax, of not being obligated to the local traditions. He points out that Ireland has been vulnerable to emigration, so Christmas is when the diaspora comes home.
“When you’re vulnerable there’s a thickness of communal memory and obligation that I love. But it’s very difficult to be alone, and that’s the point sometimes.”
Kennedy can escape his personal holiday pressures because he’s geographically removed. Cancelling Christmas isn’t easy for the rest of us. Allison Outhit is a former Haligonian musician and Coast contributor, currently working at Outside Music in Toronto and is recording a new album. She doesn’t celebrate Christmas.
“First of all, I’m not Christian, and secondly, I’m not a capitalist,” she says. She recently told this to someone, and their reaction was, “Oh, I’m so sorry.”
There’s what Outhit calls “an unbelievably intricate web of guilt” that makes it very hard to not to be part of it, especially as a mother. She admits she usually breaks down and gets something for her son so he doesn’t have to sheepishly explain his mother’s philosophy to his friends.
It’s not that she abhors all the holiday rituals. As a singer, she likes carolers and the fact that everybody has the day off and that loved ones get together. Recently married, she’s decided to participate in Christmas 2008, partly for the sake of her husband’s family and partly for her own reasons: “I am going to celebrate the motherfucker this year out of sheer spite.”
There really is no avoiding the most pervasive of national holidays. It’ll get to you, somehow. Maybe the key to escaping the commerical madness is to just shake it off, and look into developing some new traditions. Kennedy suggests taking an altogether fresh approach.
“I might learn to consume Christmas differently,” he muses, offering the option of travelling, visiting new places at this time of the year. “If I was running it, I would start from scratch. Family and homecomings, I don’t know if I would even strive to belonging again. You can have a surplus of belonging, a set of demands. I’d just stay true to my preferences.”
This article appears in Dec 4-10, 2008.
