In the traditional rush to “get it all done”, Lynn Enright advises, slow down this week …
It’s widely acknowledged that Christmas gets earlier and earlier each year, as brands and retailers seek to take advantage of consumers’ propensity to spend big in the run-up to December 25. Christmas Creep, they call it – and it’s a billion-euro strategy.
The point at which I say, “I’m done, I can take no more” gets earlier and earlier each year, too. This year, it occurred on December 6, almost three weeks before the big day. There was nothing in particular that sparked it, and even as I announced my weariness to the group chat, I had to admit that I hadn’t had an especially gruelling festive schedule thus far. I hadn’t even been to a carol service or a work Christmas party at that point.
It’s just that with Christmas, it’s like you get a new job each December. It’s unpaid, the hours are erratic, and you have to squeeze it in alongside your existing job, the housework and your caring responsibilities. You’ve an hour between meetings? Spend it perusing “gifts under €50” online, reading up on reusable water bottles and snoods. Your children are asleep and you’ve done the washing-up? Time to make a Christmas pudding, even though you never usually bake and no one in your family eats dried fruit.
December is just one long to-do list, a timeline of chores with a hard deadline looming. You’ve got gifts to buy, money to spend, nails to paint, hams to order. There are deep cleans to initiate, pantos to see, trees to dress. You do all that – and the sun sets at 4pm and norovirus lurks. It’s exhausting. But as I lay there on December 6, feeling utterly done, like a dried-out turkey leg only good for making stock, it wasn’t even the list of jobs that was getting to me. It was the thinking that had done me in, not the doing. It was the caring.
Christmas is a season of greed and rampant consumerism, of course it is – but it is also a season of deep and corny caring. To participate in any of it, to cook for others, to give and receive presents, is to surrender to feeling things, to caring for and about people, to caring what they think of you. In December, we hold hundreds of people in our heads and our hearts. People you haven’t seen all year linger in your thoughts: should you send them a card, or suggest a catch-up? You have to do drinks with your school gang, and your work gang, and your old work gang, and you have to see your in-laws and your neighbours and your kids’ friends’ parents. Can you squeeze in one more mulled wine?
It’s a month when all of us feel exposed. Who you care about and who cares about you comes to the fore. Have you been invited to a reasonable number of parties and gatherings? Do you know your loved ones well enough to choose appropriate gifts for them? If Christmas were just about trudging up and down a bougie high street, the handles of tote bags weighed down by ceramics and jars of locally made chutney digging into your shoulders, it would be hard enough. But you’ve to do all that while also fretting about what it means that you don’t actually know if your dad even likes chutney… Take that sense of unease, add sugar, booze, long car journeys and overdrafts, and you can see why so many of us end up screaming at each other as we sauté sprouts on the big day.
If there is a trick to Christmas, a knack for getting through it, for enjoying it even, it probably comes down to finding a balance between the doing and the caring. How little can you do, to allow you to care that little bit more? Swing too far in either direction and you’ll burn out before Christmas Day, so don’t overstretch yourself this week. Give them a voucher, give them a hug, give them an hour off from their kids, give them a call. Can’t manage that? Spare them a thought, send them a WhatsApp, tell them you’ll see them in January. January, yes! Remember January. It will still be cold, it will still be dark – but the locally made chutney will be half-price and the pressure will be off.
In the meantime, Happy Christmas! @lynnenright
Main featured image: Sarah Jessica Parker stars as harassed working mum Kate Reddy in I Don’t Know How She Does It – look out for the scene where she bashes up a shop-bought mince pie for a school post-carols Christmas party with the heel of her stiletto, to make them look homemade …