verging_on_random

The price of excess

December 17, 2006 on 11:53 am | In Uncategorized |

If one more person asks me “What are you doing for Christmas?” I swear I’ll slap them. I’m not doing anything for Christmas. I have no intention of putting myself to a lot of trouble and expense just to satisfy other people’s vague idea that, you know, like everyone does something for Christmas.

I grew up in a conventional middle class Church of England Sydney family. As a child, Christmas meant something to me on two levels. One was the religious level. I suspect that one reason Christianity has endured for so long is the enormous appeal of the Christmas story to European sensibilities. It’s a simple narrative with all the elements of a classic storyline that still translates well to the 21st century. Anyway the story of Jesus’ birth in a stable told and retold in genuinely joyful church services made Christmas a truly emotional time, in a good way, at least for as long as I continued to believe in it.

Decorations and other special celebrations were an intrinsic part of Christmas. The celebrations didn’t begin in any meaningful way until about the middle of December with school speech days. In our house there would be great ceremony about a week before Christmas about going into the bush and cutting a tree. Decorations for the tree were a treasured family heirloom, carefully stored for most of the year so they could be brought out and used over and over again. Breaking one of the fragile glass balls was a major tragedy. The dining room was also decorated; we had crinkled alfoil streamers that bore the signs of an increasing number of repairs over the years (they tore very easily) but the thought of throwing them away and buying new ones never crossed our minds. They were an essential part of Christmas. On Christmas Eve we’d blow up balloons and set the table with the special plastic Santa tablecloth (also used year after year).
The second thing that made Christmas special was the chance to enjoy rare treats. Presents of course were the ones I loved most. My brother and I would get one ‘big’ present and two or three small presents from our parents, together with one present from each of a number of aunts and uncles and family friends. The big present might be a glorious hard cover illustrated book; one year I remember it was a small tape recorder that I could use to tape music from the radio with a microphone. The sound quality was dreadful but I didn’t care. I was deliriously happy for weeks. ‘Big’ presents were major events. Our parents would make the choice from a limited number of possibilities put together during the weeks leading up to Christmas from a complicated process of hints and quasi-bargaining.

Gifts weren’t the only treats of course. Christmas was also a time of feasting. The standard Christmas dinner was a roast chicken (one of our own, we kept about a dozen hens), a tinned ham and assorted salads. Our family abandoned the traditional hot dinner waaay before it became fashionable to do so. I remember one year mum got very adventurous and made an entree! Cherries and mint and pineapple from memory. No doubt she got the recipe from the Women’s Weekly. Yes well stfu, it was the height of sophistication in 1960. Then we’d have ‘the pudding’ with custard. There was always intense interest in how ‘the pudding’ had turned out. To finish there’d be nuts and crystallised fruit and lollies. The whole thing was like being transported to another planet. It bore no resemblance whatsoever to any meal we ate any other day of the year.

I forgot the drinks. Being low-church Anglicans alcohol was out, but there’s be ‘fizzy drink’ as a rare treat. You know, the stuff that now comes in two litre bottles and takes up a whole aisle in Coles. Then dad mastered the art of making punch! Tinned fruit juice and lemonade. It was even more exotic than the entree. A couple of hours after dinner mum would bring out ‘the cake’. Like ‘the pudding’ she would have made this herself. All the womenfolk used to exchange pieces of their Christmas cakes and compare results. At the risk of disloyalty, I have to say I preferred just about anyone else’s to my own mother’s. Hers always seemed to have spent about three hours too long in the oven. Along with the cake there’d be lots of other home-made treats like white Christmas and rum balls (without the rum, needless to say).
There was seldom much food left over from Christmas Day. For a few days we’d have a little plate of treats after normal tea (though I never considered the piece of cake a ‘treat’) until there was only enough left for two more family serves. One was for my brother’s birthday and one for mine, both in the first few days of January. The tree would come down on New Year’s Day, all the decorations would be lovingly boxed and put away and that would be that.

It was far and away the most magical 10 days of the whole year.

As I grew up I left the church behind, so I lost one of the things that made Christmas special. And as I reflect on the ghost of Christmas past, it’s clear that any other reasons to celebrate the season have also withered away over the years.

When most people have an excess of everything all the time, how can the Christmas season be invested with any true significance? Take feasting. How can people prepare a meal that is genuinely special? Most of us eat ham and chicken every week, there’s nothing special about them. Attempts have been made to popularise the turkey but in truth it’s just a big chook. Moreover it’s increasingly bought in the form of processed frozen chunks that bear no resemblance to any real creature that walks on the face of the earth. Steggles’ EazyCarve Boneless Turkey Breast with Apricot Stuffing might be microwaveable and great for kid’s lunches but it’s not really a treat, is it? You can buy it from the freezer cabinet any time you get the urge.

I suppose there might be some people who actually prepare those Christmas feasts that you see in the colour magazines; you know, the ones that start with Coffin Bay scallops poached in absinthe served with  white asparagus tips in a beurre blanc (recommended wine: 1998 Moet & Chandon rose champagne, rrp $225) but I’m aiming this post at middle Australia. Most people now have access to such a bewildering variety of food as a matter of course that it’s damn hard to think of something practical that would constitute a truly special meal. I remember trying to buy a goose one year and gave up … i considered a haunch of venison as an alternative but as Clint Eastwood said so perceptively in Dirty Harry, a man should know his limitations.
And as for treats … it’s not even that long ago that Pringle’s crisps were only available from specialty retailers and saved for special occasions. Now you get them from Woolies, 3 for $5. We buy nuts to nibble on with a beer. And ‘Christmas cake’? Don’t make me laugh. It’s served in pre-packed plastic-wrapped slices one the counter of every takeaway food shop in Australia, 365 days a year.
Nor is it just a matter of finding something unusual to use as the basis of a special feast. There’s also the matter of quantity. When food is a comparatively scarce commodity, being able to eat until you have to undo the top button of your pants is something to remember. These days, on the other hand, lots of people feel like undoing that top button before they’re halfway through every meal. When the only white Christmas you can eat is the stuff you make yourself, it tends to be available in limited quantities and you value every slice. If you can get it at the supermarket, however, you might as well buy a shitload … and if it runs out well no worries, just go buy some more. As a result people start eating ‘Christmas food’ in early November.

The sheer quantity of food dilutes the sense that Christmas is a special time, and so does the fact that most of the enormous quantities of food available are so ordinary. I had a cake last year from a commercial bakery that I swear was made to my mother’s old recipe (she’s long dead so at least I didn’t have to eat the fucker). When people used to make cole slaw and potato salad they were usually in small quantities but they tasted good. Hardly anyone bothers to make salads anymore because everyone’s too busy and you can buy them ready made for next to nothing. The same applies to puddings and biscuits and all the other Christmas specialities. Most people eat exactly the same ‘products’, bought from the same mass retailers, made to the same bland recipes. Fighting the crowds at Westfield’s doesn’t have quite the same magic as preparing the kitchen for the one day of the year when ‘the Christmas cake’ is mixed and baked.
The typical Christmas dinner these days consists of vast quantities of food that isn’t substantially different from what people eat every week. There’s nothing much to mark it out as a once-a-year special occasion. Anything unique from the Christmas menu that was truly a treat was co-opted into everyday food items by commercial grocers a looong time ago. Consequently all we have left that’s ’seasonal’ are unexciting items that range from pleasant to inedible. Similar comments apply to drinks. The beer and wine at Christmas dinner might be a little more expensive than the beer and wine served at 100 other meals during the year, but it’s only a matter of degree. There’s nothing fundamentally distinctive that marks Christmas as a unique occasion.

Decorations often go up so early that by Christmas Day they’ve become part of the everyday furniture. And far from being a short-lived source of wonder and joy, Christmas carols are ubiquitous white noise for so long that they’re the very last thing anybody wants to hear by December 25.

And finally, presents …. well they’re a cliche aren’t they? People are bombarded with gifts but how many of them carry any meaning? Items advertised as ’stocking fillers’ cost more than the ‘big presents’ kids used to get not so long ago. People buy gifts with such driven intensity that wrapping paper comes in rolls like paper towels, because individual sheets would keep running out.

When going to the mall to ‘do some shopping’ has become one of the main recreational pastimes in suburban Australia, what chance is there that you might hit upon a gift that the intended recipient truly values but hasn’t already bought for themselves? When people ask what I’d like as a gift my answer is that I already have everything I want. I’m not being coy, it’s the literal truth. The time when we could express our love for family and friends by buying them stuff that they’d really like but can’t afford has largely gone. Even kids have such a surfeit of things that shovelling a few more into their rooms at Christmas serves little purpose. People used to joke about buying gifts for the ‘man who has everything’. These days (excluding things like houses and expensive cars) everybody has everything. Thus the sight of despairing souls in K-Mart, listlessly buying a dozen mixed shirts for assorted nieces, nephews and neighbours in the certain knowledge that most will never be worn even once.
The end result of all this for many people is that Christmas lacks any real meaning at all. It’s a self-perpetuating exercise in mass-consumerism that serves no useful purpose. The happiness that might be felt on Christmas Day reflects little more than relief that the misery of the preceding weeks has finally come to an end.

All this has probably sounded terribly misanthropic. I know that millions of people will experience moments of supreme happiness amongst families and friends this Christmas and I wouldn’t deny them that for the world. I just think those moments might be even more widespread and precious if the unique nature of Christmas had not been so diluted so much, by making it run for nearly a quarter of the year and flooding us with a veritable torrent of bland ’seasonal treats’.

So what am I doing for Christmas this year? Nothing special. If you’d like to send me a gift aftershave would be nice … I have less than a dozen bottles left in the cupboard.