Christmassy (adj.): typical of Christmas, or happy because it is Christmas
“I just don’t feel Christmassy yet,” I announced to my housemates this December, as if this was a strange turn of events and all previous Christmases had consistently carried with them a contained and secure sense of nostalgia, magic and cheer.
They nodded along knowingly, kindly sharing their own experiences of “not feeling Christmassy”, like a group of soldiers returned from war. With a similarly militant rigour, they launched into redressing my festivelessness. Within 24 hours, a tree had been bought, stockings hung and mince pies secured. There was something charming, if concerning, about the seriousness with which they executed such very cute tasks. Old cards were cut up to create placeholder tree decorations and an orange was sliced and accidentally burnt in the oven as a rustic stand-in for the tinsel we did not have.
As we were hanging some lights outside, we shared a look of mutual respect with a couple lugging a mammoth Christmas tree down our road back to their car. They spoke to each other only in hassled grunts, seemingly regretting their festive ambition with each step.
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Watching them from my precarious position on a three-legged piano stool in a tangle of wires, I could see it all clearly now – the lengths, oh the treacherous lengths, we all go to in pursuit of “feeling Christmassy”.
It is an elusive feeling and one that I, and almost every person I know, have complained about not quite achieving every year since we were children. Our perennial belief in it nevertheless is in equal parts sweet and delusional.
In any other context, it would all present as some form of madness – self-respecting adults ordering hot chocolates on their coffee break, children effectively writing shopping lists, and all of us obliging a cardboard calendar to ignore our free will and eat only one of its 24 chocolates a day.
We have created a seasonal vacuum in which such anarchy temporarily takes on the guise of a social norm
When else do we permit each other to wear jumpers that we cringe over, listen to music that we are compelled to roll our eyes at, or keep trees indoors that we have to sweep up after like some kind of shedding pet? We have created a seasonal vacuum in which such anarchy temporarily takes on the guise of a social norm.
You have to wonder what we are actually looking for in all of these baubles. What is it that we are chasing in both the 12 pubs and the midnight Mass that we don’t admit to for the rest of the year? Some mirage of Christmases past? Some sense of childhood awe that we lost somewhere between the broken boiler and sorting out the TV licence?
There is, of course, a sense of bygone times in tradition. Like a Russian doll, each Christmas contains a version of the last one, and the one before that, and the one before that ad infinitum. In this sense, “feeling Christmassy” is as much about remembering as it is a belated excuse to ice slabs of gingerbread together to make a decorative house after a long day at the office.
But I’m not sure any number of reindeer car decorations can hold up to such time-laden fantasies. In reality, they signal time’s passage more than its return and should, more than anything, serve as a reminder of our potential for child-like whimsy.
The best thing about our unending if futile pursuit of this “Christmassy” feeling is that we allow ourselves to rip through the continuum of our normal social order for once and operate within some new rules for just one fairy-lit season. More than nostalgic, it is beautiful (might I even add empowering?) that we collectively agree to step outside of the day-to-day, month-to-month rigmarole of it all to say no, I will not be going to work for the foreseeable and yes, I am going to eat my roast dinner twice in one day (but latterly in a sandwich so that it does not count as an additional meal).
I imagine people at this time of year with their Christmas bouquets and sparkly accessories and Santa jackets on their dogs, as a sprawling colony of ants – shuffling around and unwittingly working together to create a some sort of maybe-not-really-but-just-might-be magic. Adorably, they persist, despite their recurring complaints that it is never exactly as they imagined, and accepting that whatever cobbled version they come up with this year will just have to do.
[ I didn’t want to spend another Christmas pretending I wasn’t hungoverOpens in new window ]
Personally, I am heading over to England to watch my aunt star as Goldilocks in her village’s local Christmas panto this year. This is a new development in my festive rota and one that I hope will take hold for many years to come. Much like the burnt oranges still wrapped around my house’s tree, it is as endearing as it is ridiculous, as mad as it is cute, as sweet as it is delusional – “Christmassy”, in other words.
