A Very British Christmas

by Rhodri Marsden

  ‘We become the pantomime villains who spoil Christmas,’ says lawyer Rehna Azim. ‘It’s absurd, this idea that if you’re Pakistani or Muslim in origin then you find Christmas offensive, that you cannot cope with a fat man in a red fur trimmed suit, and that when you see Christmas lights you’re appalled that the natives are doing something you don’t understand. A lot of minority communities celebrate Christmas, but they may not do it openly. Often, if you go to the home of a Muslim, or Sikh, or Hindu on Christmas Day, you’ll get a really good meal, a present, and a great party atmosphere.’

  I grew up in a Muslim family in Surrey, and my mother and father didn’t celebrate Christmas. I think there’s a worry that other Muslims will think you’ve sold out your culture and gone over to the dark side if you do. But, you know, it’s a day off, so Muslim families visit each other. You do all the things that other people do, getting together, having a big meal, without actually celebrating Christmas. You see a lot of hilarious closet justification for this; if you go to a halal butchers on Christmas Eve you’ll hear Pakistanis saying that they’re buying a chicken or turkey to celebrate the birthday of Jinnah [the founder of Pakistan], which happens to be the 25 December. But there’s this fabulous celebration going on all around us, and I don’t think there’s any need to make excuses. When you have different cultures side by side, they take a bit of each other. So a few years ago I decided to start celebrating properly, with the full works – a tree, presents, a spicy Christmas dinner – and the whole family comes to me. That celebration has grown and grown.

  Last year, when my mother came over, she looked at my tree, one of those plastic ones from Asda, and said, quite wistfully, ‘You know, if we’re having a tree, I’d really love to have one of those big natural ones.’ I’d never known, for all those years, that Christmas struck something in her and that it’s something she wanted to do. She died shortly afterwards, and it made me sad that I never gave her that big Christmas tree. So this year I’m going to make even more of an effort. I mean, why wouldn’t you celebrate each other’s festivals? Any excuse for a party, right?

  R. A., London

  Some of the most multicultural Christmas gatherings can be found at homeless centres. ‘Over Christmas I do night shifts at Crisis,’ says Nikki Barnett, a project manager at C4WS, a homeless charity in north London, ‘and you’ll find refugees, Eastern European people, a lot of different heritages and religions. Everyone comes together because it’s a way of being around other people at a difficult time. We make an effort to make it a happy place; it might not turn people’s mood around completely, but it makes the day as nice as it can be.’

  The actor and writer Alex Andreou, who experienced homelessness over two consecutive Christmases, has a vivid memory of that time. ‘It’s those kind of moments when you come face to face with yourself,’ he says. ‘I remember feeling very Scrooge-like and genuinely loathing people having fun, which was small and mean of me, but also normal and human. It’s funny – while our “perfect” Christmases seem to all merge into one, I think it’s the ones that aren’t “perfect” that stay distinct, sharp and memorable.’

  Tangalle, Christmas 2001

  I signed up for a gap year volunteering programme in Sri Lanka. It was the first time I’d been away for Christmas and it felt a bit weird. It was just after 9/11 and my family was a bit jittery and asking me if I really wanted to go. But I did. I ended up in the south of the country, living in a house with other students who’d signed up for the same programme. The only other Westerners around were this other group from a rival NGO project, and we didn’t get on with them. We rubbed each other up the wrong way.

  I remember it was really warm, around 35 degrees. On the night of Christmas Eve we went to the beach; I had a bit too much to drink and ended up falling asleep. When I woke up on Christmas morning my mouth was full of dried sprats. They were coming out of my mouth like a fishy waterfall. It was disgusting. I went back to the house and asked the people I was with what had happened, and they said that a guy from the rival NGO had done it. A few days later my mother emailed to tell me that the family cat had died, and that she’d waited a few days to tell me because she didn’t want to ruin my Christmas. I was thinking, ‘Well, some guy put a load of dried fish in my mouth on Christmas Day, so to be honest it hasn’t been that great.’

  J. H.

  Six Bargains Grabbing

  Terry: Christmas is nothing but a confidence trick by big business.

  People overeat, overspend and oversentimentalise.

  Bob: I know, and I love every minute of it.

  Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads, Christmas 1974

  Complaining about our Christmas spending habits has become a national habit in itself. The annual wave of fury at everyone doing loads of shopping is triggered by our own shopping; we undermine the wonder of Christmas by buying an espresso machine and then chastise other people for doing the same thing. This has been going on for donkey’s years; a furious editorial in the Sheffield Daily Telegraph on Christmas Eve 1908 slammed the disappearance of the ‘old fashioned Christmas’ because it has ‘become commercialised’, and over a hundred years later we still see newspaper columnists spitting at the ‘ghastly whirlwind of naked consumerism’ alongside an advert for some really nice trainers.34

  Religious leaders tell us every year that we ought to be ashamed of buying loads of nice stuff. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, criticised ‘over the top’ spending in 2013, which didn’t have any effect, and the following year he urged us to ‘reject the culture of consumerism’ and that didn’t work either. In 2016 Pope Francis informed the throng gathered at St Peter’s Basilica that Christmas had been ‘taken hostage’ by ‘dazzling materialism’, and maybe I’ll join him this year in lamenting the commercialisation of Christmas, just as soon as I’ve opened all my presents.

  The most frequent accusation we hurl at society, while simultaneously filling our Amazon shopping baskets, is that the ‘meaning’ of Christmas has been lost. But it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what that meaning is supposed to be. We’re clearly meant to be commemorating the birth of Jesus, but given that only 5 per cent of us attend church on a regular basis it’s safe to say that few Brits are thinking about the son of God as they pop out to Asda to pick up some stocking fillers. If, as historians believe, Christmas piggybacked onto pagan celebrations of the winter solstice, we could probably say that the meaning of Christmas has a lot to do with pleasure, even indulgence. In the northern hemisphere it’s always represented a chink of light in the middle of a cold, dark period where we can recharge our batteries by stuffing our faces with boozy fruit cake. But in the twenty-first century, when stuffing our faces with cake is by no means restricted to Christmas, consumerism is the way we satisfy that psychological need, buying stuff for ourselves and each other in a feel-good orgy of spending.

  I spoke to consumer-behaviour consultant Philip Graves about the way we curse ourselves for debasing Christmas while also waving our credit cards about. ‘I think in Britain we have a sense of modesty,’ he said. ‘We don’t reflect on the fact that, actually, it worked out quite nicely last year when we ate and drank too much and spent lots of money. So when we’re asked if the meaning of Christmas has been lost, we remember that there’s supposed to be a more earnest, worthy meaning, and we say what we’re supposed to say! If we hadn’t been asked, we probably wouldn’t have thought about it.’

  The extent to which Christmas is defined by spending can be seen in the annual Christmas countdown; instead of the number of days left until Christmas, we talk about shopping days,35 a phrase invented by a retail magnate who wanted to sell things to us (Gordon Selfridge). His ploy to interweave the spirit of Christmas with buying little luxuries worked very nicely, but it’s not as if we needed much encouragement. Ever since shopping started becoming a leisure pursuit, the nation has been happy to grab any chance to fill baskets and trollies with paraphernalia. Yes, there will always be grouches like George Bernard
Shaw, who claimed in 1897 that Christmas is ‘forced on a reluctant and disgusted nation by shopkeepers and the press’, but the £70-odd billion we splurged as a nation in 2016 wasn’t done with a gun to our heads. ‘We’re participating in a contrived occasion,’ says Philip Graves, ‘but our behaviour indicates that we enjoy doing it. It’s the media who peddle the idea that it’s contrary to the meaning of Christmas, because there’s no story in the fact that everyone has gone out and done something they like doing.’

  “Adrian, I can’t help but feel that we’ve lost the meaning of Christmas slightly.

  That tension between what Christmas is and what it ‘should’ be seems most acute at the end of October, when we emit an indignant snort at the appearance of glittery high-street displays beckoning us into magical caves of plenty. We see them, and repeat the fallacy that Christmas begins earlier every year, but it doesn’t. It’s a strange form of amnesia. Way back in 1933 The Times was reporting the erection of Christmas displays before October was out, and in 1959 decorations were appearing in Oxford Street as early as 22 October. Even the Victorians gave themselves a good six-week run-up to Christmas, and they were supposedly a po-faced bunch incapable of having fun. No, Christmas doesn’t start earlier every year; it has always spreadeagled itself messily across November and December, although there are a couple of anomalies. There’s QVC’s Christmas In July, a shopping-channel tradition that allows you to pre-empt Christmas by snapping up a Home Reflections Pre-Lit Amaryllis in Silver Ombre Glass Vase for £26.35, or a Monty Bojangles Eight Piece Assorted Truffle Selection for slightly less than that. A couple of years ago, QVC published the results of a survey claiming that 1.38 million British people have done all their Christmas shopping by the end of July, and all I can say is that I’ve never met any of those people, or if I have then they’ve kept very quiet about their overefficient and completely neurotic Yuletide preparations.

  Then there are Britain’s dedicated Christmas stores, open all year round. One chain, The Nutcracker Christmas Shop, opened its first branch in Crieff in Perthshire, but now has shops in Edinburgh, Callander and Stratford-upon-Avon, attracting puzzled looks from passers-by as they think, ‘Hang on, it’s not Christmas yet, is it?’ London used to have its own Christmas shop very near London Bridge station, but rising rents forced it to close in 2015 after 27 years of being a quaint curiosity. ‘It was a bit quiet in the early days,’ says the shop’s owner, David Thompson, ‘because that part of town was semi-derelict. But there were so many regulars, people who just loved Christmas and wanted to build their collection of Christmas memorabilia. When we closed, we were taken aback by how emotional people were about it. I guess that because of the nature of the shop and its happy associations, we had… how should I put this… a more pleasant customer profile than your typical high-street retailer.’

  Warrington, Christmas 1987

  One year, my dad decided that we would reject crass consumerism and get back to the traditional Christmas. He declared that the family would do all the Christmas shopping on Christmas Eve, and insisted that it would be a magical, Miracle on 34th Street-type experience.

  It remains a horrific memory even now; everywhere was rammed with panicking people and stressed-out stroppy staff, and the queues meant that we could only realistically hit a couple of shops before running out of time. It was disastrous. By the end I had no option but to go to the corner shop, and I ended up giving each of my sisters a Milky Bar. We made a tacit agreement never to speak of it again. The plan was never discussed, but the following year, without reference to The Unpleasantness, my dad made a big show of starting his Christmas shopping in October. We said nothing. We understood.

  S. D.

  The Christmas shopping stereotype is that men are terrible at it, either leaving things until the last minute, or attempting to get it done early but returning home with nothing, having wandered aimlessly for hours using the ‘I’ll know it when I see it’ approach (but never actually seeing it36). This stereotype has a long history; a writer in the Luton Times in December 1902 observed that men can be ‘most amusing over their purchases… telling us that they haven’t an idea of what sort of thing women like’. Women, meanwhile, are supposedly administrative ninjas who draw up precise lists months in advance and execute gift buying in a series of swift pincer movements throughout early November. The truth, of course, is that we’re all capable of procrastinating and finding ourselves caught out by Christmas, despite the fact that it’s widely advertised and happens on the same day each year. (It’s December 25th, by the way. I should probably have mentioned this earlier.)

  Birmingham, Christmas 2006

  I worked in a high-street cosmetics shop on Christmas Eve. We’d sold out of literally every gift box we stocked in the run-up to Christmas, but that didn’t stop hordes of desperate men coming in at 5.20 p.m., minutes before we were due to close. The last guy I served was so desperate he asked to buy the off-cuts of soap and smashed bath bombs which we used as free samples, paying extra to have them gift wrapped. I did my best, but I couldn’t quite shake the image of his poor wife opening her beautifully wrapped box of broken floor-sweepings the next morning.

  C. T.

  Working in retail over Christmas can be deeply unpleasant. It’s not something I’ve ever done, but I know someone who has, and when I asked her to tell me what it was like, she answered: ‘WHY PEOPLE CAN’T JUST PUT THINGS BACK WHERE THEY GOT THEM INSTEAD OF LEAVING THEM ON THE FLOOR AND THE NEXT ARSEHOLE WHO THINKS IT’S FUNNY TO SET ALL THE MUSICAL FIGURES OFF AT THE SAME TIME WILL BE GAROTTED WITH TINSEL JUST AS SOON AS I’VE SWEPT UP ALL THE FAKE ICE CRYSTALS WHICH FALL OFF THE WREATHS AS SOON AS YOU SO MUCH AS LOOK AT THEM’, which gave me a pretty good flavour of what it must be like.

  Other dangers associated with shop work in December include a permanent, lifelong allergy to the dozen Christmas songs playing on rotation on the in-store PA. ‘When you hear the Phil Spector Christmas album that often,’ says my pal John, ‘the Wall Of Sound just becomes a synonym for being shouted at.’

  Many retail staff find themselves clamped in a Christmas vice between unscrupulous employers testing their loyalty (‘This is monkey work, that’s why I pay peanuts, if you don’t want it there’s plenty that do, so be grateful’), and unbearable customers testing their patience (‘I want a book for my mum, about an inch thick, maybe with a blue cover, doesn’t matter what it is’). Then, in the last few shopping days before Christmas, people who would normally shop without emitting frenzied roars suddenly start to become despicable bastards devoid of humanity. Manners and etiquette go out of the window. The purchase they intend to make becomes more important than anything else. If for some reason it can’t be bought, someone is going to suffer, and it’s usually the sales assistant.

  Glasgow, Christmas 1998

  I worked at Virgin Megastore on the computer games, DVD and video counter. We had a PlayStation shortage because, well, it was Christmas. A very, very angry man literally ‘took me aside’ and demanded, through gritted teeth, to know why there were no PlayStations for sale. I remember him growling slowly and somewhat comically, ‘It. Is. December. 23rd. I. Think. It. Is. Absolutely. DISGUSTING.’ I said, ‘It’s not disgusting, though, really, is it? It’s just a bit annoying.’

  D. F.

  Some of the most extreme examples of bad customer behaviour take place on Black Friday, which is the day after Thanksgiving, an American holiday that isn’t celebrated in the UK (yet) but which doesn’t stop us punching each other in the face to get 30 per cent off an Ultra HD television. Amazon was the first company to implant the idea of Black Friday into unsuspecting British heads, but it was Asda (now owned by US chain Walmart) who brought it to the high street in 2013, selling a month’s worth of televisions in 45 minutes. The experiment wasn’t without its scuffles, however, and a year later there was a troubling incident at a store in Wembley, described by the Daily Mail as a ‘stampede’. At this point Asda decided that it wouldn’t do Black Friday any more
, but we’re not a nation that likes our cut-price shopping opportunities taken away from us, and Black Friday is definitely here to stay. That weekend in November, from Black Friday through to Cyber Monday, sees us spending between 4 and 5 billion quid on stuff – although 36 per cent of Brits, according to a survey done by auditing firm PWC, shun it as a cynical marketing stunt. ‘I won’t be shopping on Black Friday or Cyber Monday because I’m not American,’ said a 34-year-old woman by the name of Hayley when she was asked by PWC, although anyone who shuns Black Friday and Cyber Monday is very likely to experience Regretful Tuesday when they realise that all the prices have gone back up.

  For all the criticism lobbed at Black Friday, it’s ultimately no different to any of the other ways that firms persuade us to buy things at Christmas. Seeing as we’re bombarded with several thousand marketing messages every day of the year, it seems odd to dismiss some of those as bad purely because they’re American in origin – not least because the idea of getting gifts from Santa came from America in the first place. ‘No,’ we seem to be saying, ‘we’re proud of British advertising techniques and we prefer to be suckered in by those, thank you very much.’ And suckered in we are, by what many consider to be some of the most skilful marketing in the world. We spend double the European average at Christmas, and savvy marketing, along with our enthusiasm for acquiring stuff, pumps that number up year on year. ‘The most successful ads manage to perfectly distil the consumer Christmas, and then play it back to us,’ says Philip Graves. ‘And it feels really nice. It’s what we aspire to.’