Bah! Humbug!

 
With Christmas just around the corner, I thought I'd post this festive piece.  I wrote it for the Straits Times back in 2008.

 BAH! HUMBUG!

“Every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.”

These are harsh words.  But no more than one would expect from ‘a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner’ like Ebenezer Scrooge, the hero of Charles Dickens’ well-loved tale, A Christmas Carol.

Fortunately, Scrooge learned the error of his ways, and by the end of story he ‘knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.’

This week, I run the risk of coming across as something of a Scrooge myself, since I wish to launch an attack on two time-honoured Christmas traditions: the giving and receiving of cards; and the giving and receiving of presents.

What’s wrong with Christmas cards?

Of course, there is nothing wrong with Christmas cards per se.  No reasonable person could object to the practice of sending out a few heartfelt festive messages to one’s nearest and dearest.  But the modern custom of sending out dozens of the damn things to all-and-sundry is enough to try the patience of a saint.

To prove my point, here is C. S. Lewis, mild-mannered academic, Christian apologist and beloved author of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, venting his spleen on the subject:

‘[E]very citizen is obliged to send to each of his friends and relations a square piece of hard paper stamped with a picture … [And] when they find cards from any to whom they have not sent, then they beat their breasts and wail and utter curses against the sender; and … put on their boots again and go out into the fog and rain and buy a card for him also.’  (From Xmas and Christmas: A Lost Chapter from Herodotus).

I once worked at a primary school where the staff came up with a simple solution to this annual exercise in futility.  Rather than everyone sending cards to everyone else, each person wrote jut one card to the entire staff, and then used the money saved to make a small donation to a designated charity.  Brilliant.

What’s wrong with Christmas presents?

The giving and receiving of Christmas presents is an even bigger hassle.  Once again, C. S. Lewis hits the nail squarely on the head:

‘Long before 25^th December everyone is worn out – physically worn out by weeks of daily struggle in overcrowded shops, mentally worn out by the effort to remember all the right recipients and to think out suitable gifts for them.’  (From What Christmas Means to Me)

Once again, no one could reasonably object to anyone buying a few meaningful gifts for family members, and perhaps one or two friends.  At the climax of A Christmas Carol, the reformed Ebenezer Scrooge buys an enormous turkey for the family of his impecunious clerk, Bob Cratchit.  God bless him for it.

But the exchanging of utterly superfluous gifts with mere acquaintances - simply because one ‘has to’ - seems to me rather silly and perhaps even a little obscene.  Once again, C. S. Lewis expresses it better than I ever could:

‘Things are bought as presents which no mortal ever bought for himself – gaudy and useless gadgets, ‘novelties’ because no one was ever fool enough to make their like before.  Have we really no better use for materials and for human skill and time than to spend them on all this rubbish?’  (From What Christmas Means to Me)

A family-member once bought me ‘soap on a rope’ as a Christmas gift.  I smiled dutifully, and said, “How nice!” and all that sort of thing.  But to this day I cannot understand why anyone would want to spoil a perfectly good piece of soap, and a perfectly serviceable piece of rope, by welding them together.

This Christmas, my wife and I have requested that our families, rather than buying us presents, make modest donations to a worthwhile cause of our choosing.  The idea is to save them time and money chasing after expensive gifts that we don’t need, and to bring some festive cheer to a group of people who need it far more than we do.

Not that we don’t intend to celebrate.  In fact, we will be having brunch at the Raffles on 25^th December.  It doesn’t pay to be too fundamentalist about these things.  After all, it is Christmas.