The Greatest Story Ever Sold...
Why Christmas flocks are being fleeced, by night and day
Full disclosure, I love Christmas. I enjoy board games, I like mince pies, I will make you prise that dusty Baileys bottle out of my cold, dead hand. I am not one of the anti-festive moaners who ‘just wants the whole thing over with,’ sourly unpinning decorations at 6am on Boxing Day. Life is tough, and Christmas, if it goes well, is an opportunity to enjoy food and drink and socialising, ideally without the omnipresent guilt that otherwise tends to accompany any kind of gentle fun past the age of forty.
However - here, a needle skitters over the Michael Buble album with an unpleasant shriek - I have never been so convinced that the whole thing needs to be scaled back.
I’m not suggesting we return to a monkish existence where a single sprig of holly goes up on Christmas Eve, just before we head to midnight mass, and stockings feature a single tangerine and three Brazil nuts. (Though if it’s a good tangerine, why not?) But this year, I’ve been more aware than ever before of the tsunami of excess that’s loosely based around the concept of Christmas, crashing through every shop, website, social media account, radio station and TV channel. It’s reminiscent of the famous scene in Witness where the killer dies struggling in a grain silo, engulfed by corn. There’s no way out, and the harder you fight, the more Christmas invades every orifice, sucking you down until you’re lying prone and skint , compressed by plastic toys and supermarket panettone.
Here comes the Guardian bit: As of September 2024, according to the ONS, 52% of UK households had noticed an increase in the cost of living. A massive 92% attributed this to food shopping, and 68% had experienced a significant rise in household bills. The lowest-income households were the most affected, while median income before housing costs was £621 a week, a drop of £10 since the pandemic. Currently, the percentage of working-age people who ‘can’t afford basic items’ is 20.9%, and and last year, 2.3 million people had to use a food bank.
Over a fifth of this supposedly prosperous nation can’t afford basics. And yet, at Christmas (which for retailers, starts the moment Halloween’s tidal wave of tat recedes), you’d think we all lived in Tsarist Russia, gaily tossing Faberge eggs between our gilded sledges. The media presses the ‘gift list’ trigger around mid-November, which, you’ll be amazed to learn, is not generally to delight readers with novel ideas, but to please the advertisers which have kept their publications in business all year. Hence the disingenuous suggestions of £600 eau de parfum and £300 beds for cats. Endless recipes (blue cheese with sprouts! A modern, sashimi twist on pigs in blankets!) follow soon after, along with ‘taste tests’ of supermarket products, which are generally a thin excuse for the entire office to trough down on a variety of luxury mince pies. Around now, we’ve reached the ‘celebrity Christmas’ stage, where someone who was voted out in the second week of Strictly three years ago explains how they always have a crowd to feed, and this year, they’ll be tossing their sprouts in blue cheese and wrapping up for a Wintry walk with all the kids.
I recently read a round up of what ‘the style crowd’ hopes to find in their stockings. Answers ranged from a £1500 coffee machine to the deathless caption, ‘For Gucci Westman, Christmas dreams are made of luxury tumblers.’
And even if you can laugh at this last-days-of-Rome nonsense, it doesn’t stop the endless parade of more ordinary ‘must-haves’ and ‘buy nows,’ with features insisting ‘now that the party invitations are piling up,’ and offering ‘speedy canapes for an unexpected crowd.’ The last time I had an unexpected crowd anywhere near me, I was giving birth and they were all junior doctors.
Aisle after aisle in the supermarkets is dedicated to Christmas food. Vast tins of biscuits, enormous truckles of cheese, tray after tray of ‘party food’, with a new twist every year (pork scratching samosas! After Eight miniature croissants!) endless mad crisps - pigs in blankets flavour, Prosecco flavour, woolly-stocking-hung-by-the fire-flavour. Then there’s cheap gift sets of floral soap that smells of being widowed, and rows of tinsel and reindeer antlers and special dog treats in the shape of Rudolph’s nose, and alcohol. So much alcohol.
And then there’s the TV ads, where happy, diverse families enjoy toys and games and gifts and food, and more food, and baubles and twinkling fairy-lights all over the snowy town. And all the events - pantomimes, Winter Wonderland, stage shows, films, skating rinks, Christmas markets, concerts, Santa’s grotto…the Daily Mail recently calculated that booking a couple of events, with food and drink, would cost the average family £500.
As for ‘Christmas creep’ - Christmas Eve boxes, matching pyjamas, ‘advent presents’ ‘Elf on the bloody shelf’ - I lay all this crap at the door of US Instagram influencers, who need endless fresh, festive content. None of it is something real people with a budget should be buying into.
According to the Bank of England, the average family spends an extra £700 on household costs at Christmas, while a Finder survey revealed that we each spend an average £923 on food, gifts, travel and going out. The most alarming survey of all, by credit management company Lowell, has also found that almost three quarters of households — 74% — rely on credit to pay for Christmas. So in effect, we’re borrowing and repaying with interest, in order to buy into the retail frenzy that exists to make us spend, spend, spend, on, to paraphrase the popular American gifting advice, things we don’t want, things we don’t need, things we won’t eat and things we won’t read.
I’m not advocating the fetishistic alternative of ‘a home-made Christmas’ - nobody wants a crocheted owl hat, or a sea of floury mince pies. All of the nonsense about ‘making your own gifts’ is a trad wife throwback to a time when people literally had no choice, because nothing was available. Regardless, nobody ever wanted a felt pen-holder sewn by a resentful nine year old.
What I do wish for is less. Less frenzy, less retail pressure, less obsession with ‘gifting’ (not a word), less Secret Santa tat (just go for a drink), less guilt-tripping, less expectation. Less Christmas. It can still be fun with less food, gifts, trips, clothes - children will always like the stories and the excitement — but it shouldn’t cripple your finances, exhaust you, or make you feel less for not investing in more, more, more.
That’s not Christmas. That’s huge, corporate companies, selling a fantasy that doesn’t exist, and never has outside of a ‘projected sales’ spreadsheet. Please don’t buy it.
Five books to help the Christmas resistance (borrow them from the library)
The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder
Waiting for the parcels to arrive through the snow…this lovely sequel to Little House on the Prairie is a masterclass in being content with what you have.
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
The OG of Christmas - no gifts, just vibes. The Cratchits know what Christmas is about. Scrooge doesn’t. But boy, does he learn fast.
Less by Patrick Grant
A brilliant exploration of consumer culture and why it’s killing us, by the Saville Row tailor and TV expert. Everyone should read it.
The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper
A perfect story for adults and children, with its roots in pagan times. ON the shortest day, young Will discovers he’s one of the ‘Old Ones’ charged with rescuing the world from The Dark, as the land lies blanketed in snow.
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Opens with a festive bang, as Jo moans about not having any presents. It transpires that she is not craving luxury tumblers or £500 perfume. She manages to be happy regardless.