Christmas is coming - again

It is always rather a problem how to spend Christmas. Forced festivities can often be as tedious as forced isolation, and over-eating has definite drawbacks.

A.G. MacDonell – England, Their England (1933)


Not that they do, but anniversaries seem to come round more frequently than they did. Christmas has certainly arrived and it is still November so that sense it has become more frequent. The garish Christmas decorations at our local garden centre began to appear in late October.

Christmas may be an oddity of an anniversary, but birthdays and other anniversaries do seem to descend on us more frequently than in the past, even though they obviously don’t. We have two significant milestones popping up in 2024. Mrs H and I will have been married for 50 years and it will be 30 years since our daughter died.

When our daughter died we were told it would it would mark us for life. We weren’t told that in a dismal sense, but to prepare us for the annual occurrence of anniversaries. Off they go and back they come. Many people must be in a similar situation to ours, but we are all ticking off birthdays and significant decades as the years roll by.

A 10th birthday doesn’t seem especially significant, but three years later at 13 we have the teens, then various age milestones such as 16 and 18. Then 20 comes along, then 30 and the decades become more ominous as we become more aware that life just rolls on at the same rate towards the same distant outcome. An outcome which isn’t ever as distant as it was the last time we thought about it.

To my mind, that’s the problem with Christmas, it is no longer the snowy, cheery, apple-cheeked festival Dickens portrayed. It begins far too early, goes on far too long, intrudes into aspects of daily life to an absurd degree. Almost as if modern Christmas is designed to be slightly depressing, a reminder of mortality, of our insignificance. A reminder of futility even.

As oldies know and youngsters don’t, age does affect outlook, so over the years it is possible to become bored with Christmas and perhaps other overplayed anniversaries. But there is an indeterminate point where excess blends into futile, where the point of it all has faded and no amount of excess brings it back to life.