Christmas looms so large in our minds that it distorts our sense of time. Rather than seeing one day ahead, of feasting and entertaining, Christmas appears like a prolonged season. Women (who in most households are responsible for provisioning, entertaining etc) stock up as if preparing for the siege of Malta. Siege-panic is also driven by the many examples in the media of well-stocked Christmas tables, surrounded by contented families enjoying the most expensive gifts. However, the urge to eat well and buy gifts is driven by more than imitative consumerism. Parents give gifts to bring happiness to their children, and, by seeing the pleasure these gifts evoke, to themselves. The desire for your children to be happy is a recognition that their lives will not always be so. But seeing their happiness pushes from our minds the pain we feel when we think of those we have loved (still love) that are no longer round the table, telling their usual jokes, laughing in the way we remember. There is another source of melancholy, derived from the passage of time. We remember previous Christmases, when we were younger and had the hopes and expectations of life we see in our children.
This mixture of emotions explains the persistence of Christmas songs that express regret and disillusion, like The Pogues’ Fairytale of New York, and Greg Lake’s I Believe in Father Christmas. Another popular song, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas from the film Meet Me in St Louis, differs in being melancholy because the singer looks ahead pessimistically to future Christmases. This made the lyrics unacceptable for those who dislike emotional complexity, and new, more upbeat, ones were devised for Frank Sinatra to sing. This re-writing follows another pattern of Christmas - the hope that over-eating, alcohol and jolly songs will swamp any emotions we find painful. Spending becomes a way in which we can avoid understanding ourselves.
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