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Why we have a family pact not to give Christmas presents
The New Seriousness did not last very long. For a few short weeks after the September 11 atrocities, there was a lot of earnest chat about things that really matter, and about returning to the enduring values of home and hearth. The powers-that-be were so worried about the flight from the high street (to home and hearth and enduring values) that they even felt obliged, in the name of patriotism, to urge us back to the shops.
They need not have worried. We didn't stay away long. The manicurists of South Kensington were empty for only a week. Ageing nightclubbers are drifting sedately back to Annabel's. And we are all shopping again, or at least most of us are; we are not just a nation of shopkeepers, we are a nation of shoppers.
That can be the only explanation for the extraordinary interest shown in a confession by my fellow columnist Andrew Marr that he intended to boycott early Christmas shopping. His many well-considered views on this and that, such as Afghanistan or enduring values, have not, it seems, excited anything like the passionate reaction of press and public to his feelings about shopping.
Columnists and feature writers took up the theme, letters followed and his own wife wrote to this newspaper, accusing him of insincerity and dereliction of duty. Clearly shopping, and Christmas shopping especially, touches a sensitive national nerve.
How sad it is. And how odd. Every year I am horribly depressed by the nonsensical fuss that intelligent people make about Christmas shopping. Mrs Marr, for instance, says that she has a minimum of 29 relations who all "need presents at Christmas". Who actually needs presents? I'm reminded of the maternity nurse in an Evelyn Waugh short story who presents the young mother-to-be with an enormously elaborate, expensive list of baby equipment and who, when asked whether it is all essential, replies grimly that it is quite essential for those who can afford it.
Of course it is important (and a pleasure) to give presents to some people at Christmas, even to children who have already got far more toys than they know what to do with: their over-sophisticated little faces will light up for at least a couple of minutes. But the idea that one has to buy expensive objects for one's entire extended family and inner social circle seems not only daft, but also faintly obscene, especially now. Christmas is not just about presents.
I had better be careful. Not only is it unpatriotic to seek to undermine shopping, but it will also soon be illegal to say anything about what Christmas is or is not, or how not to celebrate it, for fear of incitement to religious hatred.
I know that many people's Christmas arrangements are not really religious and that there is nothing in the Bible about Christmas trees, but with ill-considered, catch-all legislation such as the proposals currently in the Commons, and with the usual conflation of religion with culture, one cannot be too careful. So I will say it while I still can. Christmas need not be about shopping, about having and spending. Conspicuous consumption, though fun, is not a duty. Competitive present buying is something you can leave to other people, unless you enjoy it and have lots of time and money. Long ago in our family, we made an agreement that adults would not exchange Christmas presents; it has been wonderfully liberating.
However, the rush to the shops isn't merely in pursuit of presents. In the past 20 years, there has been an explosion of expectation, and of choice, and Christmas now has to be "lifestylish". Even downmarket magazines and colour supplements print helpful shoppers' countdown calendars of how to plan your shopping days to Christmas.
These aren't merely the usual (and incomprehensible) instructions about when to make and freeze puddings and sauces and game pies for 12. They also compile thoughtful lists of this year's "must-haves" of motifs for tablescaping and Christmas tree bedizening, of new ethnic baubles, new embroidered tablecloths, new minimal napkins, new blown-glass candlesticks, designer crackers, customised scented candles, festive silver name-card holders, handpressed wrapping paper, shot silk and taffeta ribbons, competitive flower arrangements and staircase swathes. And on and on. And a wreath of contorted hazel twigs and dried persimmons for the front door, so long as it is entirely different from last year's and from everyone else's.
No one has to buy any of this stuff. Tablescaping is something we can all get by without. No one even has to buy very many presents. Most people claim to hate the whole thing and some of them, at least, must mean it. I can only think it must fulfil some deep inner need. A few years ago, I read a survey that claimed that the vast majority of people feel truly "empowered" only when in a shopping mall.
This remains a mystery to me; being in a shopping mall is the only time when I feel absolutely disempowered - helplessly confused and demoralised by extremes of senseless choice between thousands of pretty much identical objects, in pretty much identical chain stores.
Think of the hundreds of bottles of indistinguishable shampoo; was it for this that capitalism triumphed? Capitalist materialist sybarite though I am, all this strikes me as decadent, or at least as quite unnecessary. Christmas to me means family love and enduring hope: I suppose that's the old seriousness, in part, and it still survives.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, November 24, 2001
