The Geek of Christmas Past

This year marks my first ever Christmas spent in the northern hemisphere. As I write this, I’m sitting in an apartment in St Andrews, Scotland; the outside temperature is a balmy 7 degrees Celsius, but we’ve had a few days in the minus zone, too, and for the past few weeks, the average has been about 3. In two days time, my travelling philosopher-husband and I will head to Belgium – specifically, the town of Leuven, home of Stella Artois beer. Undoubtably, it will be cold. Christmas itself will be spent in Leatherhead, Surrey, in the company of friends, family and – one hopes – a good deal of sloe gin. (Sidenote: sloe gin, for those of you who’ve never imbibed, is entirely awesome. Just so you know.) But despite having spent every previous December 25th sweltering in the Aussie heat, devouring cold cuts, sushi and prawns before a trip to the beach or a dip in the pool, being in a cold climate feels…natural.

I mean, let’s be honest: there’s something fundamentally weird about the idea of celebrating pine trees, snow, fat men in red velvet, reindeer and roast turkey on a continent which consists almost entirely of desert. Admittedly, there’s some charm to the image of Santa in shorts and thongs lounging at Bondi, but deep down, I think that most of us in the southern hemisphere consider the traditional trappings to be, if not wildly inappropriate, then at least deeply ironic.

Cooler climes notwithstanding, however, the modern Christmas represents a curious mishmash of strange symbols – even the central religious aspect, which celebrates the birth of Christ, is decidedly off-centre, given that both historians and Christian scholars agree that Jesus was born in March. The December date comes from a pragmatic decision by the early church to make their celebration coincide with the pagan festival of Saturnalia, thereby allowing monotheistic practitioners to blend in with Roman society. The practice of bringing an evergreen tree into the home stems from much more ancient notions of sympathetic magic, in the belief that some of the tree’s verdancy would rub off on the household during the winter months while symbolising the eventual return of spring.  Santa, too, is a very patchwork creation: having started out as the gift-giving Saint Nicholas of Myra, he was renamed after the northern figure of Sinterklaas, and finally given his modern appearance as a jolly, red-and-white-robed fat man by no lesser entity than the marketing division of the Coca-Cola Company. While Santa had been depicted in red robes long before Coke came into existence, it was ultimately three decades of commercial propagandising which established the current conception of Mr Claus – a fact which caused one favourite high school teacher no shortage of anxiety at the end of each year.

Throw in the rampant commercialism of the season, primary school nativity scenes, muzak carols, knotted Christmas tree lights and overpopulated family gatherings inevitably fuelled by the lethal combination of hereditary tensions and homemade eggnog, and you have yourself a recipe for unpleasantness. Or at least, for potential unpleasantness. Because underneath all the nonsensical ornaments, bad cracker jokes and obnoxiously drunken relatives lurks a single, simple truth: that Christmas, more than anything else, is a time to make and cement our own traditions.

As a child, this involved my mother reading me The Polar Express at bedtime on Christmas Eve, years before Tom Hanks ever thought to put his grubby mitts all over it. Ever since 1992, watching The Muppet Christmas Carol has been an absolute must – and if you’ve never sat down to an evening of Kermit the Frog as Bob Cratchit, Michael Caine as Ebenezer Scrooge and the Great Gonzo as Charles Dickens, this is something you need to fix right the hell now, because, seriously, people: Christmas movies just don’t work without an all-singing, all-dancing Muppet cast. Other than that, provided someone keeps the eggnog and champagne flowing, I’m good to go.

As impossible as it seems to my childhood self, it’s a truth of getting older that Christmas becomes less about the getting of presents and more about logistics: where to go and in whose company, what to buy and for which people, what to spend and how to afford it, what to eat and how to ignore the scales afterwards. It’s not that I don’t enjoy the proceedings anymore: it’s just that all my best memories of the holiday relate to childhood, like the wonderful, glorious year my parents finally relented and bought my first game console – the original PlayStation, complete with a copy of Spyro the Dragon. Knowing how much I’d wanted it, they let me think that my pleas had gone unheard. I felt downcast, but, not wanting to seem ungrateful, kept it to myself. And then, with a twinkle in her eye, my mother ventured that perhaps there was one more gift on top of the wardrobe – would I like to check? I pulled down not one, but two boxes: one big, one small. In an almost unprecedented show of restraint, I opened the little one first. It was Spyro. I stared at it, half-afraid my parents had somehow assumed I could play the game on my computer, before remembering the bigger box and tearing it open with absolute delight.

Greedy, commercial – probably, it was all those things. But it was also joy, the pure, unadulterated breed of delight that only occurs between the ages of four and fifteen, and which, as adults, we must instead seek vicariously through the bestowal of lavish gifts on younger people. It’s a symbiotic system, and one in which, despite its faults, I’m happy to participate.

So, whatever your Christmas traditions, religious convictions, festive hang-ups, gift-related neuroses or geographic location, have a wonderful 25^th of December, Trespass readers! And remember: when gift-shopping for the geek in your life, it’s always hard to go past an amusingly-worded t-shirt. 

 Image credits 1, 2