A great and unwelcome festive truth has come upon me this year. ’Tis not the season of goodwill, ’tis the season of willpower, an entirely different and notably unjoyful undertaking.
I noticed it first when my diary began filling up with social events and I began crying. This is quite normal – please check with your nearest introvert if you don’t believe me – but when staring down the barrel of a prolonged season, not hugely sustainable.
So I had to start holding firm and saying no to things (some may also go through the list of things they have already agreed to and annotate entries with: “Claim deadline/cold/suspected Covid the day before” – I couldn’t possibly comment). This is an unnatural exercise, even for one as practised in the art as myself, who once floated the idea of my sister standing in for me at my wedding when I suddenly realised I was basically going to be at a party THE WHOLE DAY.
At Christmas, the normal rules aren’t supposed to apply. The people you have spent the rest of the 12 months training not to invite you to things suddenly expect you to be up for anything. It is hard to say no, and yet you must. Your gregariousness is no greater than it already was. So hold the line.
Then there is the willpower required not to eat your own rapidly-increasing bodyweight in mince pies, chocolates, nuts, glasses of fizz and the million other little treats that the advent of advent brings, long before you get to the Christmas Day blowout itself.
There is also the strange twist of needing extra strength to survive the onslaught of people who, if you explain that you are trying not to ingest the calorific requirements of a working shire horse every hour, will explain that we live in a body-positive age and that you are being fatphobic if you wish to be able to get into your old jeans and/or up and down stairs without passing out. But Christmas past a certain age is a time for willing your mouth shut in all sorts of ways, and so you say nothing.
Next, you must stand firm on the Christmas budget – probably firmer than ever this year, as the cost of living crisis, which seems primarily to be a scam perpetrated on the consumer by companies and brands who leapt with alacrity at the chance to leverage a global conflict here and a drought there into inflation-busting price rises and record profits, but that’s probably another column. A deeply unmerry Christmas to all you untrammelled greedy bastards meanwhile bites chunks out of your earnings.
And finally, you must gather all your remaining health and strength to deal with your relatives. By which I mean to stop them coming, if they are truly, rabidly awful; to limit – clearly, without room for misinterpretation, wilful or otherwise – the duration of their visits; to endure their presence and their conversation, which can range from the merely stultifying through to emotionally devastating, without perpetrating a crime against them.
Looked at honestly, the older you get the more Christmas becomes a time when more is taken from than restored to you. It’s great for fortunate children of course, as it should be. But when you are Santa, chef, socialite and UN diplomat all in one – less so. It is four weeks of relentless depletion of just about every resource you can think of.
It took me a while to realise this – that Christmas is no longer the magical time it once was (I was a very fortunate child, and our family Christmases were uniformly lovely) nor the blissful interlude that adverts, films, magazine articles and Instagram promise us it will be. That it is, more often than not, a grind. A labour of love with the emphasis on labour. Once you realise that, once you accept the season on these new terms, life becomes a little easier. Which shouldn’t stop you delegating as much as possible, of course – you are not anyone’s dogsbody and all those old enough and healthy enough to contribute should do so in some appropriate measure.
But putting down the mental cudgels is a gift you can give yourself. Instead of resenting every effort that goes into this endeavour and worrying that the execution falls short at every turn, acknowledge that it is a time that asks a lot and frequently too much of us and perfection is a futile goal. In fact, my present to you is this assurance: giving up on your dreams is a shortcut to peace. Especially at Christmas, but you can pin this pearl of wisdom onto your breast and take it with you long into the new year as well! It is the gift that keeps on giving.