Conspiracy theories are alive and well. “The Earth is flat” is old now. “The moon is a hologram.” “Pigeons are government surveillance drones.” “There are no trees,” is one of my favourites. Exquisitely simple and delightfully unhinged. Of course, some conspiracy theories are quite true. Watergate. Various CIA hijinks that sound unfeasibly preposterous, like putting microphones on cats during the Cold War and of course, Christmas. Christmas is a mass conspiracy in which most of us willingly engage each year.
There’s the obvious part, upon which we won’t elaborate here lest any younger readers happen upon this article while trying to open Netflix episodes of Bluey on their parent’s phone. But you know. There is also the conspiracy theory where everyone pretends that Christmas does not magnify every insecurity you have, every strained relationship you’re barely managing, and every historical resentment you’ve been carrying since childhood.
We don’t actually like Christmas. We only like bits of it. Eating without any tangential reference to health. Rotting in our pyjamas until the afternoon. We like having just two consecutive sacred days left in the year when it still isn’t acceptable for anyone from work to email us. Not even email guy. His verbose, self-celebratory emails that are the written equivalent of being trapped in a lift next to an extrovert with halitosis. He schedules them for evenings and weekends so he looks busier than you. He uses horrifying phrases like “circle back” and “ping me” unironically.
We like the ideal of Christmas. Of childhood, family, rest. The reality, though, is often strained, and sad, and weird. Because there’s your brother (the one everyone’s always worried about) fervently explaining why there really are no trees, actually. There’s your uncle – the kind one, not the drunk shouty one – who is sitting at the Christmas table for the first time since losing his wife. He looks somehow smaller than last year, everyone in the room bearing witness to a terrible pain far wider than anything you could breach by reaching a hand across your mother’s fancy tablecloth.
There’s your cousin Martin, who you only ever see at Christmas and who hates everybody. You suspect he may be buying explosives on the dark web and someone should intervene, but you have the ham to keep an eye on. Your sister is sonneting sonnets about how the new guy she’s dating is definitely “the one”. The last “one” tried to get everyone in the family to invest in his new protein powder company and then racked up €7,000 in parking tickets on your sister’s 2014 Yaris. There are the children, who you love so utterly, and whose pleasure in this day has dominated much of your waking thought for weeks. You’ve been cooking for seven hours. They are complaining that yes, they had wanted gravy, but next to the potatoes and definitely not on the potatoes, which are now consequently inedible, and can they have toast and Nutella instead?
When families get together, the past re-establishes itself. You’re 13 and misunderstood. You are also your current age and making cups of tea for irascible elderly relatives and churlish teenage ones. Or just missing someone so viscerally that you’re barely even in the room yourself. Hanging on. The year is closing, the cold eye within you casting back over it, contemplating what you didn’t achieve, what you don’t have, who isn’t here. You might be alone or surrounded by family. There is no frustration, resentment or self-pity quite so strong as the kind you feel when you’re under pressure to be content and comfortable.
[ ‘Trust me, I’m a family Christmas expert and these are the rules to live by’Opens in new window ]
Christmas is nice, and it’s hard. It takes some of the pressure off to allow the ideal to float away and work to appreciate what we have, whether it’s an often-infuriating family, a good partner, decent friends or just a safe place to be and something nice to eat. It helps us to find compassion when we’re tempted to push our mother-in-law’s face slowly, satisfyingly into the bowl of cooling stuffing we made when she says, while transferring a chocolate brazil nut from one side of her mouth to the other, “I wouldn’t be putting sausage meat in my stuffing, now. Are we back under British occupation?”
It’s okay, probably, if Christmas is something you barely tolerate or a time that just doesn’t mean what it used to for you. We can love people and find them intermittently intolerable. We can look at everyone around us and recognise that they too – from unsettling cousin Martin to our suddenly republican mother-in-law – are attempting to manage a day of dissonance. Weigh the expectation of what it should feel like against how it really does, all while being observed by people who have years of receipts. Nobody wants to spoil the mood by saying openly how much harder the day is without someone who you wish so desperately was still there. To tell a sympathetic person that your mother-in-law makes you feel insane, or to just tell her that putting you down in public won’t make the stuffing less Protestant. To corner cousin Martin, gently, and check if he’s being radicalised. To call someone who is alone on Christmas Day, or missing someone, and without the agony and privilege of being driven mad by their idiot family. You could tell them the CIA put microphones on cats. It’s a real conversation starter. Then ask how they really are.
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