How we love and hate Christmas
This November, as usual, we at Ground Truth found the end of the year unexpectedly here. Tinsel appeared in the office. Arrangements were made for an office Christmas party. Chrismastide was closing in on us fast. And then we decided to slow down, to intervene… and to talk to some people to get a sense of how others feel about Christmastime: tis it the season to be jolly?
We interviewed five people who didn’t necessarily have anything in common except their connection to a dog park in the outer-inner-north of Melbourne. It turned out, however, that all also shared some aversion to Christmas that marks and complicates fond memories of the date. This post is an attempt to unpack — a little — such holiday ambivalence.
First, each person brought a photo from a Christmas past. (Except for David, who greeted us as Santa and made a photo out of the interview!)
It was striking that, however happy the scene seemed, for most respondents their chosen photo was attached to a painful memory — of abandonment, or an excluded dog, for example. For the couple others, discussions surrounding their photo still quickly led into criticisms of Christmas.
“I came across a couple classic photos where she’s smiling with gritted teeth on Christmas. ”
Mark “hate[s] the fact that you’re expected to be having a great time because society tells us you’re on holidays.” As others pointed out, there are specific reasons one might feel stressed or down in the holiday season: as work both gets busy and looks like it will dry up in coming months or as you find yourself reflecting on the last 12 months and asking… “So this is Christmas, and what have I done?”. End-of-year stress is magnified by family stress and the accompanying demand to “play happy families”.
And within broader family tensions and conflicts, single women (and perhaps some single men) have a distinct Christmas anxiety: being shamed for showing up to the family event without a partner or kids.
Thus, many of our interviewees’ favourite fun memories were of the rare Christmases which involved “getting away from it all” — ‘it’ generally being a loved but decidedly un-fun family. How to escape? With the help of friends and/or grog!
This fact — that a low-key Christmas spent in Paris is fun, while the annual family lunch often isn’t — perhaps explains our respondents’ negative responses to a recent Coles Christmas ad which depicts a young woman frolicking around a never-ending Christmas lunch table to get to her place. It was seen as “over-the-top”, “un-relatable”, and “setting an expectation which can’t be met”. Or as Joe put it: the Coles ad is “depressing in a way a fantasy is… There are all these people and the connections go on and on, while my family is very secluded on Christmas. I mean is that what everyone else is doing? It looks fun.”
Importantly, while the people we spoke to wanted more fun in their Christmases, what was ‘fun’ was laughing, letting loose and connecting, not receiving presents. The “rampant consumerism” of Christmas was identified as a major concern, and everyone had made the move to Kris Kringle to minimise their Christmas shopping and consumption. We also found that, when gift-giving was joyous, it was usually when the gift was going to a kid.
Indeed, across the group, there was a notable tendency to reminisce about Christmases from when people were kids, or when their children or nieces and nephews were young.
Relatedly, there was a positive response to Woolworths’ 2022 Christmas ad which shows a woman at a small family lunch taken back to her childhood after smelling a mango. In comparison with the Coles ad, this one was received as “Australian”, “simple”, and “not too overwhelming”.
And for most, the dominant childhood memories tended to be of times when their family was less complex, simpler: before parents had divorced, children had moved cities, or siblings had formed families of their own.
Given the pertinence of such memories of familial harmony, perhaps it’s not so surprising that despite all of the downsides of Christmas we discussed — the unmet expectations, domestic labour, family conflicts, boredom, consumerism, and obligatory events — no one expressed a desire to abolish Christmas altogether. For Mark, for example, Christmas is a time when “family is forced to get together” — but it also corresponds to “the need to get together as people”.
So what to do about Christmas then? Our interviewees didn’t just share antipathy for Christmas. They also had in common an acute analysis of the contradictions of our Christmas feelings. Because it is a ritual repeated every year, Christmas can feel stale and forced. But as a tradition and permanent fixture in the calendar, it is familiar and helps to conserve a family while its members change. For many this conservation is important. For some, given their particular situations, being free of a toxic family dynamic is more important. A few basic things are universal, however. Everyone wants more fun, more relaxation, and less hullabaloo this Christmas. Perhaps the upshot is to experiment with tradition.
“For me my favourite part of Christmas is when everybody’s gone home and David and I get a small glass of wine and we sit in the front lounge and just reflect on the day and on the weeks leading up to Christmas and we say... It’s done!”
