Suzanne Harrington: If you want to escape the hell of aggressive Christmassing, just leave civilisation
"How can you detach when Christmassing is shoved so squarely in your face? When the shops and telly have weaponised I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day and turned it into reality, so that for a chunk of the year there is no escape from it?"
Suzanne Harrington, at Santa school a few years back.
Ah, the early onset Christmas ads, blaring into our sitting rooms from early November, persistent as chlamydia.
The corporate mini-films are designed to suck us in, representing something that doesn’t exist. Playing us like Pavlov’s dogs with access to ApplePay.
Imagine if they did a truthful one: “We know you’re broke, knackered from the cost-of-living crisis, and working all hours. So we’re going to bombard you for two months with aspirational images that harangue you into buying loads of landfill rubbish you don’t need and can’t afford, because if you don’t, you’ll have failed as a human being, and are a terrible parent. [Cue wide-eyed children on Christmas morning]. Jingle bells to all our shareholders!”
This aggressive Christmassing can go two ways: you’re either on anti-depressants by the second week of November, or in a state of rage that lasts to the January sales.
Rage is easier. Every year, your blood bubbling as the shops pile ‘em high with glittery crap months, MONTHS, too early.
Just ignore it, advise friends sagely. Just blank it out. But how?
How can you detach when Christmassing is shoved so squarely in your face? When the shops and telly have weaponised I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day and turned it into reality, so that for a chunk of the year there is no escape from it?
You can’t even hide under the duvet, it’ll be on your phone too. Just tune it out? How? By gouging out your eyeballs and stuffing them in your ears?
This is when those letters to agony aunts and uncles start appearing, the ones that begin “I’m dreading spending Christmas with my in-laws/family/hideous children/alone with the cat."
Why, oh why, do we do this to ourselves, re-enacting a Mike Leigh film year in, year out?
Don’t despair. There is a way to swerve Christmassing which is guaranteed as effective as those neuro-blockers Pete Doherty takes to neutralise heroin.
It’s magic. It means you can walk into a November shop full of festive tat, and mannequins draped in the tired old sparkly frocks wheeled out each year for ‘party’ ‘season’, and experience not a rush of irritation, but a shrug. You feel… nothing. Zen.
You can purchase whatever you came in for: a spoon, a nostril hair trimmer, headache pills, and not leave with eight over-priced make-your-own-gingerbread-house kits, ‘luxury’ Christmas crackers, comedy slippers and a plastic elf.
You can bypass the emotional and financial labour of doing Christmassing allocation maths, of who gets what, and whether it will be delightful/original/ethical/interesting. No, it won’t. It will be in the bin by New Year, and you’ll be paying it off until August.
Here’s how to bypass it.
Leave.
It doesn’t matter where, so long as you’re gone for the entirety of December. Nothing luxury. That’s what you’re trying to escape.
No, an Airbnb in Kyrgyzstan. Trekking in the Hebrides. A mountain shack. Anything. Just leave, and let them crack on without you.
