It’s the Observer Magazine Christmas shopping special. GOD BLESS US, EVERY ONE! MERRY CHRISTMAS, YOU WONDERFUL OLD BUILDING AND LOAN!! LOOK, FRANK, IT’S A TOASTER!!! I quote these classic Christmas movies* so that the many, many people who peg their status as uniquely perceptive truthsayers by hating Christmas and pointing out what a ripoff it is will know what they’re in for in the pages to come. A hall-decking, jolly-being orgy of food, merrymaking and (yes) gift-giving that involves shopping, in shops. It might be gauche to love Christmas, but I’m afraid I just do. And while I know I’m supposed to abhor the commercial excesses of the season, I’m afraid I just don’t.
Christmas pushes my buttons like a touch-typist on uppers. It’s because I am by nature horribly sentimental. I’m also an optimist and a child of the 80s consumer boom. Christmas-wise this is a lethal combination. Each year I am seized by the conviction that a) Christmas can be perfect; b) It must be perfect for the people I care about; c) It is my job to ensure this happens; and d) The best way is to follow the instructions on adverts. The rational part of my brain can see the problems here. But in December the rational part of my brain likes to kick back with an eggnog and let the Christmas part of my brain take over. That’s an area by the hippocampus made of mincemeat and tinsel, which lights up when I hear East 17’s “Stay Another Day” and believes that if I watch Love Actually yet again, Laura Linney will not answer the sodding phone, and get off with the French guy instead.
My Christmas brain thinks shopping can be like it is in ads: knitwear-swaddled patrons making their merry way down a bustling high street. It bypasses my actual experience (waiting for the bus in the rain with plastic bag welts on my fingers/lost under burning strip lights in Toys R Us with a work-do hangover) and skips straight to the onscreen ideal. My rational brain can remember when my husband and I went late-night present shopping and had to pull into a pub car park so I could breastfeed our infant son, only to discover that it was a dogging hotspot. My Christmas brain says FA LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU.
My Christmas brain is similarly selective about which childhood shopping memories it will allow. The first trip of the year to see Fenwick’s Christmas window in Newcastle is in, followed by long, attentive study of the fragile, inky pages of the Argos catalogue (a treasure map of the adventures ahead). Finally there are my reminiscences of what was then Europe’s biggest mall – the MetroCentre, Gateshead. It contained a faux-Victorian town square, a funfair, a fence made of giant pencils and indoor fountains full of sparkling pennies made shiny by the nostril-stinging chemicals in the water. Paradise. My Christmas brain tells me that 80s visits there were a heady mash-up of the “Last Christmas” video and the Andrew McCarthy film Mannequin. Occasionally, real memories puncture the illusion. A short but vivid fight between Santa and Rudolf. Santa trying to rip Rudolf’s head off while the reindeer screams a phrase I hear as “you funning gasket”.
Mostly my Christmas brain chooses to remember the good stuff, and I’m fine with that. There are 364 days in the year for reality. I don’t think it’s too much to set one aside for fantasy. “Christmas shopping” is a benign, elective delusion. A phrase that pretends Christmas is something you can buy. We know it isn’t. It’s not about spending a lot; it’s an excuse to enjoy planning celebrations with the people you love. I missed it completely last year – my dad was very ill – so this year I’ll be making up for that, enjoying Christmas presence and presents, too.
*A Christmas Carol, It’s a Wonderful Life and Scrooged
