The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas (11 page)
Read The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas Online
Authors: Robin Harvie
J
ON
H
OLMES
This year, as you sit in the gap between Christmas and New Year, idly crushing liqueur chocolates into your mouth, wondering why each and every one tastes the same no matter what liqueur it purports to contain, what will you do to pass the time? Perhaps you’ll get round to watching that dvD box set of television you got (“All of television! On a billion disks!”), maybe you’ll suggest playing traditional yet baffling games (“Who’s for Barrymore Cluedo?”), or you may be considering combining the two and playing games while watching television by switching it on and then trying to guess the
number of sweets in Eamonn Holmes.
But wait. May I politely suggest an alternative? This year, instead of lying fatly on the sofa under a flimsy cracker hat, by now spooning pickle into your gob because you’ve run out of chocolates, why not simply sit quietly at this special time of year and take some time to reflect upon all of mankind’s greatest achievements? Sit and marvel at everything science has achieved. What we’ve learned, what we’ve built; how far we’ve come medically, creatively, and technologically. And then, when you’ve done that, try to figure out just how, in the several billion years since we flopped out
of the sea and grew legs, we appear to have reached a point where someone considers it acceptable to have taken all of our knowledge of light and electricity and used it to fashion a six-foot-wide snow globe with a festive scene in it that’s specially designed to sit in someone’s front garden each year looking inexplicably cheerless.
Well done, science. You must be very proud. How did that conversation in the laboratory go?
“What shall we do today? Invent a time-travel device, find a cure for cancer, or come up with some sort of animated globule with a Santa in it that will look stupid outside people’s houses at Christmas?”
“Ooh, ooh, the third one! I’ll fetch the tinsel!”
I have a strange relationship with outdoor decorations. I don’t mind a tasteful Christmas light or two. I’d happily slow down to look at a small white bulb glowing here or a splash of illuminated tree there, but the ones I’m talking about are those that cling on to the front of houses like flashing, electricity-sucking ticks.
You know the ones I mean. You’re driving along of an evening, and then suddenly, as you round a corner, it’s like someone’s inadvertently opened the gates of hell during Satan’s office Christmas party, and before you know it, all the garb from Dante’s tenth, lesser-known but equally unpleasant circle (the Walled City with Kitschy Crap All Over the Wall) has burst out and become stuck fast to the brickwork of a drab semi.
There’s a village just down the road from where I live that, at this time of year, can be seen from space. It’s as if the residents have had a competition to see whose house can be made the most hazardous to passing air traffic. Honestly, it’s like everyone who lives there has spent the last few years rushing down to the remains of Woolworth’s, gathering up armfuls of anything that glitters or lights up, rammed it all down the endpipe of a shoulder-mounted missile launcher, and then fired the whole lot at their dwellings like a gaudy bomb, a bomb that’s spread out on impact and covered their w
alls and roofs in a furious splatter of garish Christmas trinkets.
Now, if you’ve done this, I’m sorry to have to tell you that chances are any of your neighbors who haven’t done this will want to kill you. And not quickly either. They probably want to take the tangled wire from that shitty angel that you’ve got in a tree and hang you with it in the center of the road as a warning to others. And then wrap your body up in the tattered remnants of a punctured inflatable Father Christmas and leave it on the doorstep of Argos to dissuade anyone else from ever buying one.
So the question is: what do you do if you want to seasonally decorate your house without everyone around you wishing both you and your electricity supply dead? Well, fortunately for the residents of the aforementioned village, everyone who lives there joins in, so as you’re kept awake between the hours of November and January by a glow not dissimilar to a melting reactor pressing against the curtains, you can rest assured that your 8-billion-candlepower neon Santa on the chimney is burning your neighbor’s sleepless eyes off as well. And this may well be the answer. Nope, you can’t go it al
one with a glowhome or your neighbors will simply spend Christmas hoping for an elec
trical fault that burns your house and all its adornments to bits. The only way forward is to get everyone else to join in. It’s all or nothing in the world of animatronic snowmen and sequencing rope lights, because if it’s just you who’s got a life-size incandescent Nativity scene on the lawn and no one else, then you’ll stand out like a moob at a gym and everyone will hate you.
Actually, while we’re on the subject, there’s another thing. Why are people no longer satisfied with a few simple reindeer or a straightforward wall-mounted flashing “Merry Xmas” sign? For some reason, there are now various lit-up depictions of Santa using modes of transport with which he’s not normally associated and which, quite frankly, would be a hazard to any form of rooftop present delivery. Sure, there are the usual smattering of sleighs, but now, every year, from the end of October onward (when somebody, presumably a git, has decided that Christmas begins), there are an
y number of lit-up representations of Santa riding everything from a hot-air balloon to a train and a bike. In exactly what version of the story of St. Nicholas did he bring presents on a bike? In no version, that’s what version. Is it because a bike or balloon is a modern, greener alternative to a mystical sledge? Or because they’re cheaper to run, what with the spiraling cost of reindeer feed in a global downturn? Whatever the reason, it plainly makes no practical sense, because whichever way you ride it, a train, bike, or balloon just wouldn’t be able to cope with the rigorous demands of traveling round
the world in one night, stopping off to deliver presents.
For a start, storage on a bike is notoriously poor, and don’t even get me started on the reliability of a train. Santa would optimistically board the West Coast Mainline with his sack of presents, and then only get as far as Nuneaton, where he’d have to pick up the replacement sled service because of planned engineering works at the North Pole.
Another “decoration” I’ve seen was bolted to a bungalow and had Father Christmas going up and down a tasteless, flashing ladder. Duh. Santa doesn’t need a ladder, does he? For one thing, he’s magic, and for another—it’s a bungalow. All Santa would need to do is stand on the wheelie bin and use a drainpipe for purchase. There’s certainly little point in his carting a bloody great ladder around. It’s completely unrealistic.
So anyway, if, to you, Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas and would simply be ruined if your house wasn’t radioactive, then here’s an idea. Let’s suppose that I’m right and the only way to have outdoor lights and not be killed is to make them communal. All you need to do is make the community bigger. Global, even. If you’re going to blind people with Christmas, then you have to make it count. So here’s my plan: why don’t we just make one great big simple glowing outdoor decoration that we can all hate together as one? Why not take every meretric
ious outdoor Christmas light on the planet . . . and put them on the moon? Let’s turn the moon into a giant astrophysical bauble—plus it’s got a head start because it glows at night already.
And don’t worry about the logistics of having to collect up all the decorations on Earth and ship them to NASA in readiness for Operation ChavPlanet, because I’ve already thought of that too. Gathering up all the flickering angels and Santas and mangers and donkeys and snowflakes would be easy because all you’d have to do is tie one end of a rope to the plastic Rudolph next door and the other to the tail of the space shuttle while it was on the launchpad. Then, when it blasts off and leaves Earth, it would rip all the outdoor decorations out of all the gardens of the world in one go and y
ank them all into orbit like a giant space sleigh. And once they’d been dropped off on the moon, the newly astro-trained residents of the village near me could be standing by to decorate the lunar surface, while those of us left on Earth would stare humbly into the sky knowing that man is up there, attaching Santas on ladders to the sides of craters and rigging up a plastic waving fairy in the Sea of Tranquility.
And then, when it’s switched on, as tiny beings on one small planet floating alone in the inky, majestic blackness of space, we could all hate it together. One small step for a man, one giant, gaudy waving snowman for mankind.
A
NDREW
M
UELLER
Some years ago, a magazine that retained me as a columnist and resident curmudgeon asked me, in the interests of balance, to dash off a few paragraphs of Scroogeish grumbling for their Christmas issue. It ended up amounting to 406 of the toughest words I’ve struggled to compose. It wasn’t that I had trouble identifying aspects of Christmas that I found objectionable; these were, and are, giddyingly manifold. It was that enumerating and explaining them felt—even by the existentially excruciating standards of writing op-ed commentary—hackneyed and futile.
Every complaint about Christmas has been made, and made often. It would be utterly unsurprising if a hitherto undiscovered gospel, disinterred from some Dead Sea cave, recorded a previously undocumented witness to the Nativity of Jesus reacting to the arrival of the Magi, and the gifts of gold, myrrh, and frankincense they bore, with an indignant tut of “Tch, it’s all got so commercial.”
Nevertheless, I tried. I enacted the ritual rage against annoyingly cheerful television commercials, tacky shop windows, witless seasonal novelty pop hits, bumptious television presenters, stupid hats, shrieking idiots staggering out of office parties, the incessant instruction to Simply Have a Wonderful Christmastime, the annual exhumation of Slade and Wizzard (“I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday”—hardly surprising, given that it’s the one day in any calendar anyone still gives a figgy pudding about Roy Wood). I harrumphed about the fact that the whole dreary circus begins earl
ier each year—by my admittedly unscientific calculations, it will be as soon as 2037 that the first Christmas decorations go up before Easter. And I moaned that the worst thing about feeling like this was knowing that the only people equally vexed at the reduction of the Great Redeemer’s birthday to this grotesque and fatuous carnival of consumption were the sort who’d rather spend Christmas—and, indeed, every Sunday morning—kneeling on cold stone and mumbling in Latin. “Bah!” I concluded. “Humbug!”
It made no difference, of course. Observant readers will have detected that, even despite the most strenuous efforts of a commentator so widely respected and feared as yours truly, Christma
s continues to be celebrated—and perhaps, I will bemusedly concede, even enjoyed—by substantial tranches of humanity.
In some respects, I have no problem with this. Though I suspect that many of the yarns spun about Jesus of Nazareth by his disciples have been somewhat tweaked for dramatic effect—and a few of his entourage were, after all, fishermen, a profession proverbial for a diffident relationship with the truth—I greatly admire what seems, in my admittedly inexpert view, to be the message at the core of Christ’s preaching: i.e., try not to spend your brief time in this corporeal realm acting like a dickhead, and be mindful of the other chap’s point of view if at all possible. There are wors
e historical figures for whom we could insist on throwing an annual planet-wide party. Like, for example, almost all of them.
So it’s not the fact of Christmas but the manner of it that depresses and alienates: the vast coercive conspiracy to shrilly insist that you do and think absolutely the same thing at the same time as everyone else. So overwhelming is it that even those of us whose instincts would tend away from leaving brandy and biscuits out for Santa Claus and more toward acknowledging the night before Christmas by planting a bear trap in the hearth grudgingly discharge their festive duties: eating too much; drinking what proves to be never quite enough; spending money on, and time with, pe
ople we spend the rest of the year avoiding; slumping in front of our seventy-third viewing of
The Great Escape
; feeling a stultifying empathy with the cooler-bound Steve McQueen, and idly daydreaming of a tunnel under the wire, forged travel documents, and freedom.
Happily, there are options. The most prosaic of them is to spend Christmas Day at home, alone. This is more difficult than it sounds, and the reason why is the best illustration—and condemnation—of the oppressive groupthink that Christmas engenders: nobody wants to let you. When you announce your intentions to sit proceedings out, people—whether motivated by guileless charity, a faint hope that the presence of an outsider may serve to dilute their annual family bloodbath, or outraged resentment that someone is going to get away with it—will insist that you spend the day with them
. It is therefore important that your preparations for a solitary Yuletide are conducted in secrecy, perhaps with the aid of the useful misdirection always available when one is invited to several things on the same date, i.e., telling anyone who asks that you’ve already taken up another option. If you pull this off, the rewards are considerable, and perhaps even appropriate: the most peaceful day you’ll have all year. Catch up on reading. Go for a long walk—you will own the streets of even the most bustling conurbation. Revel in the thought of those less fortunate or determined than yourself, feigning ex
citement as they remove the wrapping from
gifts they didn’t want presented by people they can’t stand. Enjoy a serenity unbroken by the flying crockery with which so many people’s nearest and dearest express their joy at having this precious time together.
It may be pointed out that this course is hardly suitable for readers encumbered with children of their own, or similar signifiers of something dimly recognizable as a grown-up life, like a spouse or indeed any palpable responsibilities whatsoever. There are two possible responses to this. The first of these, “Ha ha ha ha ha ha,” may be interpreted in some quarters as not constructive. This being the case, it’s best to move on to practical escape plans that can be made, if necessary or desirable, in concert with others.
For anyone living amid any culture rooted in Judeo-Christianity, the very idea that Christmas can be escaped may seem absurd. For a quarter of every year, the music they hear, the periodicals they read, the television they watch, and the streets they walk are dominated by reminders of who is unchallengeably in charge—it’s like spending 25 percent of your life living in a dictatorship, albeit one tyrannized by a fat bearded bloke in pajamas and boots. It is also, sadly, increasingly the case that even those parts of the world whose predominant faiths or ideologies theoretically preclude them
from subscribing to this gaudy inanity—the 1.3 billion Chinese and 1.1 billion Indians who (mostly) shouldn’t care, for a start—are buying into it anyway. That they are doing so for nakedly commercial motives is commendably honest, but it’s no less annoying.
There is much to be said, therefore, for decamping to somewhere people believe some variation on the monotheistic legends. The people of the Islamic world revere Jesus of Nazareth as an all-round good egg, and are also keen on his mother—Mary is the only woman mentioned by name in the Koran. Muslims in Muslim countries do not, however, make an untoward carol and dance about Christ’s birthday. I discovered this a few years ago, when I happened to be spending December in the Holy Land, the place where Christ’s message was first propagated (and, of course, where it has since been most assiduo
usly ignored). On Christmas Eve, in my hotel in East Jerusalem, just a block away from the Damascus Gate, I considered my options for the following day. The Old City of Jerusalem itself, I thought, would be a bit much (the Old City of Jerusalem is always a bit much). Going to Bethlehem, a taxi ride and a couple of Israel Defense Forces checkpoints away, might make me feel like a gatecrasher—for the people who’d made the effort to be there, being there would be a big deal, and I had no wish to intrude (for the same reason, though I enjoy visiting churches, temples, mosques, and synagogues when I’
m traveling, I always keep away during services, unless invited). So I called my Palestinian fixer.
“Let’s go to Hebron,” she suggested.
Hebron is known for, among other things, being the burial place of Abraham. By some interpretations, the entire millennia-spanning gory travail of human history has been essentially a family feud among his descendants. Spending Christmas with the patriarch instantly struck me as either devastatingly apt or wildly inappropriate, and either way, an excellent suggestion.
And so it proved. As a writer with a straitened budget, I was relieved to discover, upon disembarking from the taxi that had borne us from Jerusalem, that this wouldn’t be a dead day in my itinerary. Everything in Hebron was open, aside from the old city’s shuttered and largely abandoned marketplace. This was closed not temporarily out of religious observance but permanently because it had become a front line in the internecine squabbling of the great-great-umpty-great-grandchildren of the chap entombed at the far end of it. But away from the parts of town annexed by Jewish settlers and the Isra
eli soldiers protecting them (rather reluctantly, more than one was willing to admit), Hebron had the amiable bustle typical of Arab cities. The shops, cafés, and restaurants I visited offered an added seasonal bonus: I was barely allowed to pay for anything.
“They’re usually pretty friendly to visitors down here,” explained my fixer over lunch, “but they know it’s Christmas Day, and they think you’re a Christian.”
I sipped my complementary coffee, returned the smiles of the beaming restaurant staff, and felt vaguely guilty.
“Not,” she continued, “that they’d care all that much if you told them the truth. They are genuinely honored.”
I asked her to requite the sentiment on my behalf, my Arabic not being all it might. And I wondered, if one took a global view, how many people hosting other people were, right at that moment, regarding their guests with such pure-hearted generosity. If someone can conclusively demonstrate that the percentage clears double figures, I shall strap on a pair of antlers and guide Santa’s sleigh personally.
Delightful though Christmas in Hebron was, it still felt a bit of a cheat, and I worry that any similar excursion would also induce the nagging sensation that one was benefiting from hospitality under slightly spurious pretenses. You’re not really avoiding Christmas if you’re spending it among people who are being nice to you because they assume you’d rather be celebrating it. Given that the same unease will afflict anyone deflected from the home-alone strategy by the kindness of friends, it is clear that more drastic measures are called for.
The invention of a time-travel device that would enable one to skip December 25—or, indeed, to hurtle backward roughly 2,000 years to the Middle East with a view to asking one well-meaning carpenter if he w
as certain he’d thought this whole thing through—is probably still some years away. The next best thing does exist, however: the combination of passenger jets and time zones. On several Christmas Eves, I’ve joined kindred souls at Heathrow, climbing aboard the flight that takes off late on December 24, refuels briefly in some conveniently unchristian way station—Dubai, Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong, Bangkok—and arrives on the east coast of Australia early on Boxing Day. Not only do you miss the whole thing, you’ve access to the greatest jet-lag recovery cures available—sunshine, leftovers,
and live coverage of the Test match.
Though it’s unfair that one is driven to such lengths, such lengths are necessary. Because it’s not just about avoiding Christmas. It’s also about avoiding the assumptions and the jokes that people make about you when you do. These are largely the fault of Charles Dickens. It’s thanks to his creation of Scrooge that anyone who voices the most reasonable of objections to Christmas is reflexively dismissed—or, worse, patronized—as a mean, tight-fisted, lonely ogre. Which is like believing that all vegetarians nurture ambitions of remilitarizing the Rhineland, invading Poland, and building a Reich
that will last a thousand years.
Let the record show that I enjoy all the following: eating well, drinking a lot, spending time with friends and family, giving presents, receiving presents, getting cards and e-mails from people I haven’t heard from for a while, and Phil Spector’s Christmas album. I’d just prefer to enjoy all those things when I decide to. Declining to take part in Christmas isn’t easy, but conscientious objection of this sort is liberating, and satisfying—and, for what it may be worth, much more respectful of Christian believers than trudging along with it. (Along the same lines, though I have in my
time quite sincerely wished people in various locations all the best with Ramadan, Diwali, Ashura, Yom Kippur, or whatever they were having themselves, it would have felt ridiculous to celebrate any of these personally.)
I’ve never believed in God, but I’ve never wanted to prevent anyone else from doing so, if that’s what gets them through the night. This life is short and this world is weird, and the appeal of an off-the-peg explanation for everything is not hard to discern. All I’ve ever asked of the faithful is that they keep it to themselves, and avoiding Christmas is my way of extending them that courtesy. I encourage my fellow unbelievers to consider the same course, and to book their flights. Christmas: if you can’t join it, beat it.
