For Christians, Christmas is of course a time rich in religious meaning, but those of us who don’t share the faith can appreciate the unique way the season settles quietly around us, slowing everything.
That “Betwixtmas” span of languid, overfed days between Christmas and New Year, which feels like it exists outside time somehow in a vortex of ham-and-stuffing sandwiches and classic films, is for many the only window left in the year when the furious pace of the world outside really does stay there.
If you have a job that nobody’s life is depending on, work emails are taboo. There’s no spreadsheet emergency that can justify someone sidling into your inbox. Few are the bosses with the courage to look an employee in the eye and bellow “You’ll get me that report by December 29th will you?”
“I will in my hoop,” you’d think. In this brief annual lacuna, the momentum halts. We can exhale a breath we hadn’t realised was caught tightly in our chest. There’s a collective understanding that we’ve done all we can for now. This is the time for standing still and seeing out the year.
If you were lucky enough to have good parents, you were likely at the centre of Christmas Day as a child. Adults around you worked far harder than you realised to create an experience that modelled what it means to care for others: kindness, generosity and consideration. Children don’t notice the carefully oiled machine that shudders into life to create the magic of a good Christmas, and they shouldn’t.
Stressing and budgeting at the kitchen table is for adults. Kids should just feel cared for, excited, and part of the beloved traditions that make up their family’s festive season. Swept along by the ambience and anticipation that only Christmas can bring. And the sugar.
Then we grow up and discover that this season feels very different when we’re no longer at the centre of it. Christmas becomes something to orchestrate rather than experience. Anticipation blurs into anxiety, and we feel the weight of family expectation and social pressure. Our ideal of what Christmas “should” be frays as people naturally move away, drift out of our lives, or die.
Families expand and contract. Irish ones in particular are prone to scattering across hemispheres. Those who move abroad are tasked with building new traditions or adapting old ones to new settings. Something we once felt so sure of – that Christmas must be a particular way – suddenly becomes less true.
‘Christmas isn’t a childhood memory recreated each year. It’s a vital, changing set of traditions that connect you to your past but can only have meaning in the present’
This can be sad, and it can be liberating. Christmas is no longer something other people create for us. If childhood didn’t include the Christmas we should have had, adulthood gifts us the freedom to create it now. Either way, we learn to let go of the idea that this solitary day can only be a particular constellation of people in a particular place.
In adulthood, we gain an appreciation for the preciousness of this slow time, and the fragility of the life we’ve built. We can notice what there is to be grateful for and we can appreciate the people who are still here, even when they aren’t across the table from us. Even when some of them may still be able to draw out the churlish adolescent inside us. That ghost of Christmas past.
These days, Christmas is upside down for me. I will sit down to eat stuffing and roast potatoes in the searing heat of an Australian summer, where the rhythms of the season feel utterly alien to the ones I grew up with.
Nothing feels like Christmas, and yet I’ve spent Christmases in different countries, in rental apartments and in bad hotels (and once, a really nice one). I’ve sat huffily in an emergency department waiting room as Christmas Eve tipped over into the day itself. Last year, our presents were stolen on Christmas Eve – an event so ludicrous and so unconscionable that it became comedic. We laughed at our terrible luck. We presumed that whoever took our gifts must need them more than us, and we tried to feel compassion for anyone in such straits that they had to do a Grinch. We made do.
Clutching an idealised version of the day doesn’t leave space for the dissonance and sadness this time can bring, along with the merriment and indulgence. Christmas isn’t a childhood memory recreated each year. It’s a vital, changing set of traditions that connect you to your past but can only have meaning in the present. If you aren’t a religious person, the most meaningful thing the season offers is permission to stop.
Christmas changes because everything changes. If we can allow it to evolve as we do, we can find what there is to love about it right now. And, of course, there’s always the sugar.