It started with the decorations. Christmas was once a supermarket plastic bag bristling with sweet, tacky, red and green tinsel that smelled like 20 years of pine, a string of mini pretend presents that, in spite of their very obvious hollowness, begged to be opened, and – most important – the angel tree-topper. Her face was a 1970s plastic nightmare. I loved her. She meant magic.
Apparently, my dad had bought the whole job lot from a petrol station, way before I was born. Little did I know, aged four, they had been purchased in the spirit of, “this’ll do”.
One December in the late 90s, they disappeared. I came home from school that evening to find something grim. Something unholy. Something … classy. My mum had been to Habitat. The arboreal costume jewellery of every Christmas I could remember had been replaced by wicker balls painted a matte gold so unenticing I cried. Where was the tinsel? Where was the beautiful drag queen-looking angel? Where was Christmas? As I sat weeping for the lost innocence of that day, my mum tried to explain to eight-year-old me what “naff” meant. The new decorations – if anything so insipid can be awarded decoration status – dangled like upcycled Weetabix. I’d recently learned about Hitler. I think I hated them more than Hitler.
So began my mum’s all-encompassing programme of de-sentimentalisation. She and my dad reinstated the “this’ll do” philosophy. And this time round I noticed. For my older siblings and me, Christmases and birthdays now, increasingly, meant one thing: cash.
“How much do we give them again?” my dad would ask my mum, before stuffing the contents of his wallet into cards to suit whatever occasion had been simmered down to the emotional equivalent of buying a pack of batteries.
By the time I reached my teens, my family’s cold war on gift giving was in full swing, fuelled by mutually assured disappointment. This didn’t start as an anti-capitalist, or anti-commercialisation movement; it was mostly just anti-effort. My mum’s reasoning was that taste is just too personal a thing. For her, being presented with some unknown thing wrapped in paper is to relinquish control. Why buy one another things we’re bound to hate when we could buy ourselves things we actually want? Eyes locked on the middle distance, she tells the story of when, in the 80s, my dad bought her seed pearls.
“You could barely even see them,” she says of the earrings that were – if her increasing volume is anything to go by – anathema to her. In all fairness, my mum has never been a seed pearl kind of woman. When I was three she had a pair of earrings made of pink liquorice allsorts, which I duly ate. The point is though, jewellery-wise, if it’s not loud, she’s not interested. To her, my dad’s choice of seed pearls prompted the question, “Who do you even think I am?”
My seed pearls were boat-shaped. At Christmas 1996, when I was seven, I suffered a mild identity crisis when I unwrapped a remote-control yacht. Just to clarify – this is in no way a case of “pity the poor, neglected child who got a toy yacht for Christmas”. I wasn’t upset, exactly; I was confused. I hadn’t asked for a yacht. I’m not sure I knew what a yacht was. When my older brother took me to the park to sail this “yacht” thing on the pond, I watched with bemused indifference as it bobbed around for 30 seconds before sinking like a shoe. I was almost relieved. The yacht wasn’t me at all, and I was disturbed at the idea of having to become a yacht person, so as not to offend a presumably senile Father Christmas. When I didn’t cry, my brother assumed I was dead inside, and we went home. Yacht-less. The highlight of that afternoon was learning what “capsize” meant. To this day, my dad claims I asked for that yacht. Knowing me, and not knowing yachts – I didn’t.
As far as my mum was concerned, the yacht incident was perfect fodder for her anti-gifting propaganda machine. “See what happens when other people choose possessions for us?” Maybe she’s right in a way. Perhaps gifts are just expensive emblems of how little we actually know one another. I still really wanted them though. I wanted wrapping paper. I wanted suspense. I wanted the “naff” Christmas decorations back. Where’s the mystery in opening a card and having a couple of banknotes flop on to your lap? It was borderline bureaucratic. Every birthday felt like payday for the job that was staying alive another year.
My brother, whose annual refrain is “Mum’s ruining Christmas again”, has managed to maintain his rigidly pro-gift stance. Meanwhile, I’m weakening. My terrifyingly practical older sister – now too busy with two young kids to wrestle with the endless email thread of family politics – has been on my mum’s side all along. My dad hovers in the background, shrugging from behind his laptop.
I have a suspicion that another one of my mum’s motives for her crackdown on gifting was the avoidance of mess. The first Christmas my now brother-in-law spent with my family, he was horrified to be woken up – at 7am – by my mum ushering us all down to the Christmas tree with the festive call of: “Let’s get this over with, I want to tidy.” Genuinely afraid of disobeying her, we sat in the living room opening our presents as quickly as possible, while my mum disposed of wrapping paper like some kind of bah, humbug robotic furnace.
I have friends who do “Christmas shopping”. Who agonise for days over what things their family may genuinely like. Granted, these friends probably have conventional Christmases with drunk uncles, and Monopoly, and turkey. I doubt they grew up – as I did – thinking Christmas dinner was all about screaming and tidying. Constant tidying.
There is nothing more festive to me than the melancholic, “hoooooooove”, of a vacuum cleaner, and my mum yelling, “Whose is this?” seconds before binning whatever “this” may be.
In recent years, the mess and sentimentality elements to gift giving were stripped so bare that, as an entire family, we’re down to one Amazon voucher.
Whoever has a birthday receives a now ceremonial email informing them that they are, for now, in possession of The Voucher, which has been paid for by the rest of the family. The Voucher is passed from person to person, from birthday to birthday. The Voucher is good. The Voucher is safe. The Voucher is invisible. All glory to The Voucher. Although, while it may work for birthdays, we haven’t figured out a way of making it work at Christmas. Perhaps the only logical solution is that we sit in a circle, each behind a laptop, and everyone buys an Amazon voucher for the person to their left. We all press “send” at the same time. One blow of a party horn indicates it is time for us to shake hands. The second blow signals the end of all festivities until next year.
This year, as usual, my mum has suggested a full moratorium on Christmas presents. A part of me wants to buy her something so meaningful that her faith in gift giving is restored. A much bigger part of me knows that, whatever I buy her, she’ll pretend to like it for about 15 minutes, begin to grimace, ask for the receipt, then dispose of the wrapping paper like it’s nuclear waste. All evidence of there ever having been a present will be demolished.
Twenty years on, my yacht may still be at the bottom of that pond. Coated in algae. Ignored by frogs. Serving as a wistful reminder to absolutely no one that, in some families, gift giving is futile.
