Hello everybody,
This week we’re looking at philosophical reasons to like Christmas as a grown up.
You can find the companion article here: All I want for Christmas is a sense of purpose
We each have 10 good Christmases.
I’m willing to compromise on the exact number — sometimes more, sometimes less — but I would like to argue that most people reading this will have roughly 10 great Christmases.
When you’re one or two, you don’t really know what’s going on. Chocolates in the morning are nice, and seeing Mummy and Daddy dancing is worth a laugh, but the world’s already so full of wonder, one more day doesn’t add much more. Then, when you’re a teenager, the magic kind of seeps out. It’s still fun, no doubt, but it’s not jaw-droppingly enchanting. Santa’s a fraud, carols are boring, and Christmas dinner is just an hour away from the new toys.
That leaves roughly 10 years between toddlerhood and teenagerhood, where Christmases are the best thing ever. And for the rest of our lives, we feed off those 10 years of memories.
I am not a Scrooge McMisery Guts. I love Christmas. I love mince pies, tacky decorations, and can perform a full choral rendition of “Carol of the Bells” on my own*. But so much of the warm, fuzzy, nostalgic glow around Christmas stems from my own early childhood years.
In psychology, this phenomenon is known as the “peak-end rule” — the tendency for people to remember an event or judge an experience based on how it felt at its peak. When we reflect on a hike, we think about the lovely vista at the top. When we think about birthdays, we think about going out drinking or getting great presents. And when we think about Christmases, we remember the one our eight-year-old self remembered.
In this newsletter, I do not want to shatter any childhood nostalgia. I do not want to pierce the peak-end rule of Christmas. Instead, I want to make the grown-up, adult case about why Christmas is awesome — on its own merit and without the golden glow of the past.
So, here are three philosophical reasons why Christmas is brilliant.
*Available for events.
Three reasons to love Christmas
First, Christmas is sacred.
Of course, for some people, it’s deeply important that Christmas is religious. Christmas is right at the heart of the Christian calendar, and “The birth of the Messiah” is understandably considered to be big news for a Messianic religion.
But when I mean “sacred” in this sense, I mean the fact that Christmas supersedes everything else. Like it or loathe it, Christmas is the time when you just have to drop everything else. The office is closed, the shops are shut, and everyone’s got automated emails on. Christmas, for most of the Western world, is a kind of lighting of the beacons. “Come home,” the beacons say, “See your family. Drop your work. Put on a silly jumper.”
When Emile Durkheim talked about the “sacred,” he meant those things that we protect and ring-fence from everything else. Yes, Christmas might be a materialistic extravaganza of Amazon delivery vans and overspending, but it’s also important to people. It’s good to have at least a few “sacred” things in our lives that are placed above all the normal, humdrum, stressy tedium of the everyday.
Second, giving gifts is important.
Like it or loathe it, gifting is important. In fact, anthropologists tend to say that almost all societies we have ever studied have demonstrated some kind of gift-giving ritual at some point. Humans give gifts for a variety of social and emotional reasons, but one of the most philosophical reasons centers on attention.
We’ve all been given bad gifts. They might be the oddity found in a novelty mug or a garish pair of trousers you’ll never wear. Or they might be practical and prosaic — not bad per se, but not special, for sure. Socks and ties are lovely in the most underwhelming sense of the word.
But when we’re given a truly meaningful and thoughtful gift, it can feel incredible. When we receive something from someone who understands us entirely, or, better yet, we get something that we didn’t even know we needed, we’re gifted twice. We have the physical present unwrapped, but we have the infinitely more valuable gift of being seen, being known, and being loved.
A well-chosen gift is a grasping, reaching effort that tells the receiver they matter to you. As the poet David Whyte put it, “Giving means paying attention and creating imaginative contact with the one to whom we are giving; it is a form of attention itself, a way of acknowledging and giving thanks for lives other than our own.”
I hope you all get these gifts this year. The unwrapped present is only a part of it. The wrapping itself is the real gift — it’s the bit that says you are valuable to someone. You’re on someone’s mind. You matter.
Third, Christmas is a festival.
Needless to say, I am not a doctor. And always consult your physician before doing anything a philosopher tells you. But one of the great joys — at least in my mind — is the fact that Christmas is a binge. It’s ripping at the seams of propriety to say, “Right, screw it, pass me the cheeseboard.”
Sometimes, we all need a party. When you’ve had one of those years — where it’s mostly doom and gloom, and nothing seems easy or fun — it’s good to have a big few days to put a stop to it. If you’ve had a year of stressful and long days, a busy pub or living room full of riotous laughter and clinking glasses is the perfect balm. In the long, cold, flowerless winter, what you need is an overindulgent midwinter feast. Humans need to party. We need a blowout once in a while.
A party needn’t, of course, be a caricature of drunkenness. It doesn’t have to be Rose dancing an Irish jig in the bowels of the Titanic or Tolkienian dwarves spilling ale into their beards. It could be a Christmas movie binge, a computer game marathon, and a chocolate box inhaled. The point is that Christmas is the breather in the rat race. It’s the cheat day at the end of a hard year.
So, yes, Christmas might not be as nostalgically warm as those 10 childhood years, but there are many reasons to enjoy it nonetheless. I hope you and yours had a great time of it, and I hope to hear from you all again in the new year.
Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. Go well,
Jonny
IN YOUR OPINION
There were many great answers to “What has been the best gift you’ve received?” last week, but my favorite answer this week came from Elaine:
“Anything handmade, but especially from my children.”
I love that answer because it’s true that there’s something qualitatively different about a handmade gift. When you give something you have taken the time to make, you gift not only the item (in fact, the item might be gnarly, wonky, and a little rough around the edges), but also time, attention, and effort. And time, attention, and effort are what you give to the people you love.
Next week, we’re exploring birth, regrowth, and new beginnings. And so I’m asking:
What’s been the greatest transformation in your life?
Jonny is the creator of the Mini Philosophy social network. He’s an internationally bestselling author of three books and the resident philosopher at Big Think. He's known all over the world for making philosophy accessible, relatable, and fun.
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As I write this comment, I'm holding my 2-month-old daughter; the greatest transformation I've been through, which took quite a few years to happen and it's not really over yet (will it ever be?) was the one that took me from being a cynical and self-centered teen to a grown woman with just enough courage to face the huge challenge of bringing a child into this crazy world. In other words, it's the transformation of de-centering, of hope and of love.
I guess a lot of people didn’t get their 10 because I got way, way more than my share.