Christmas: you can have too much of a good thing
Call me a workaholic, but 17 long nights strikes me as a long time to have on your idle hands in the depth of so-called winter
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Your support makes all the difference.Maybe there was a dog in the playground when we did this in what was called Scripture in my childhood, but I missed the bit in St Luke’s Gospel about the Nativity leading directly to 16 days off.
And lo, after the shepherds and the kings, came the office workers who had nipped off early on the Friday before Christmas with no intention of passing Reception again until the first full week in January. No, that definitely wasn’t in my version.
Yet, unlike the Magi, who had camels to harness and tricky myrrh to source, most people are at a bit of a loose end within a few hours of the big reveal. Even so, two days ago I distinctly heard the festive jingle of logging-off and revving up for an evening on the Petersfield bypass. “We’re back on the fourth of January”, the business world sang, to the tune of “We wish you a merry Christmas”, and silence fell.
Call me a workaholic, and no one has yet, but 17 long nights strikes me as a long time to have on your idle hands in the depth of so-called winter. And while it is true that, at 16 degrees in the shade, it is as likely to catch the sun now as in the average July, the great British body is hard-wired in December to a dish of buttered crumpets and knitwear that hurts, and not a piña colada sipped in slingbacks.
The salopettes society does not know this, but not everyone goes skiing, one of the more resistible ways of losing money being to pay through the nose to fall on your tush. And so, those winter days drag on.
In a partly secular society it seems perverse to spend longer on a religious festival than many people give to their summer holiday, although you can never devote too much time to thinking about destitute families fleeing persecution and sleeping rough. Atheists love to point out that the end-of-December knees-up is pagan anyway, and vague Anglicans like me will cheerfully concede that point.
But here is a plan. Let us mark the virgin birth*/end of 12 gruelling months of unrelenting slog* (*delete as appropriate) over the traditional 12 days, partridges, pear trees, panettone, the lot, by celebrating Christmas Day on 21 December.
Yes, of course start with the official national hangover on 1 January, but then leave it all behind: new year, new start. Down with the ivy that very day and into the festive compost, off with the tree decorations and out with the vacuum cleaner.
The primary purpose of Christmas cards, is not, as it would appear, to provide a refuge for would-be artists who flunked their Brownies’ junior designer badge at the fifth attempt, but to cover every flat surface in the home and put an end to dusting for at least a fortnight. But a new year does not start promisingly in a mucky house or with a chunk of the staff on the piste.
So today, in my new liturgical calendar, is Christmas Eve. Hurrah! Champagne, anyone?
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