On keeping Christmas simple

You don't need to do it all

In my last post I wrote about Advent, and why I have decided to observe it as a fast period for the first time. Today’s post is a follow-up of sorts…Enjoy!

Photo by Nathan Lemon on Unsplash

In the UK, it feels like the Christmas season starts earlier and earlier each year. As soon as Bonfire Night is finished (Nov 5th), then the build up to Christmas begins in earnest. I love Christmas, and it has always been one of my favourite times of year. I love the food, the magical twinkling lights, the opportunity to decorate my home beautifully, the carols, the time spent with family and friends. I am truly no Grinch. However, as much as I love Christmas, I do not love the way our culture treats it. I don’t just mean that the spiritual significance of Christmas is largely ignored, although that is part of it. Even when I wasn’t a Christian I could tell that the manic and excessive consumerism that our culture encourages was truly ruining Christmas. Far from being a season of joy and cheer, for many people Christmas is a very stressful experience.

In A Circle of Seasons, K.C. Ireton observes that having abandoned the liturgical year of the church, our culture has instead embraced a festive calendar “grounded in capitalism, which requires consumption…there is a sale associated with each and every cultural holiday or occasion to induce us to consume more”. We are sold the idea that an extreme level of consumption and spending is necessary to give our loved ones a ‘magical Christmas’. Mothers in particular bear the brunt of organising and facilitating all of these activities, yet feel guilty if they want to opt out or observe a simpler Christmas, worrying that they are somehow ruining Christmas for everyone else. The volume and cost of all these activities seems to increase each year, yet as a culture we shame those who don’t enthusiastically embrace “the Christmas spirit”, calling them a Grinch or a Scrooge.

Hot take: the thing that actually ruins Christmas is the whirlwind of activities, expectations and expenditure that our capitalist economy tries to convince us is necessary. Children especially do not benefit from too much excitement and stimulation, and it is totally possible, more enjoyable, and kinder to our Earth, to celebrate Christmas in a simpler way.

To be clear, I’m not against gift giving, or enjoying delicious food, or spending time celebrating with family and friends. Giving and receiving gifts is an ancient tradition, and one that appropriately marks the moment in the Church year where we celebrate the greatest gift of all: the Incarnation of Christ. I love buying and receiving presents. It is a very good thing to spend time with our loved ones, and to enjoy food together. What I am against is the relentless push for more more more, the encouragement and proliferation of excess in a world where so many go without.¹

So how can we resist the onslaught of commercialisation and overconsumption? Well, as I said in my Advent essay, we resist by remembering that connection is more important than consumption.

Connection over consumption

Our culture tells us that we need to do and buy all the things in order to give our children (and ourselves) a magical Christmas…but this is a lie, and it is a lie that is making us unsatisfied and miserable. I am trying to be intentional about what I choose to do over the Christmas season, focusing on things that were memorable to me or my husband as children. We’ve accepted that we can’t do everything, and that’s fine.

I want Christmas to be a magical time of year for my children. I want to create family rituals and traditions that they remember fondly and want to recreate with their own children. How much of our frantic busyness is an attempt to recapture the sense of magic and wonder that we experienced at Christmas as children? Yet, when I reflect on what made Christmas a magical time when I was a child, the memories that stand out are simple ones: icing the Christmas cake with my mum with Handel’s Messiah playing in the background; finally decorating the Christmas tree a few days before Christmas; waking up to a stocking full of inexpensive but thoughtful gifts; spending time with my cousins and extended family; reading A Christmas Carol as a family each year; and when I was a teenager, an annual trip to go ice skating on the outdoor ice rink at the Manchester Christmas markets.

The common denominator for all these memories is that they were things I shared with people I loved. So that’s what I’m going to do with my own children, call me a Grinch if you dare! We’ll be making gingerbread, icing the Christmas cake, making (and eating) mince pies and sausage rolls, spending time with loved ones in different parts of the country, and OF COURSE putting a stocking at the end of the bed for our daughters to open on Christmas morning. I really liked

Dixie Dillon Lane

recent post on how she selects stocking fillers for her family, check it out here, my mum followed very similar principles.

As mothers, we set the emotional tone for our homes.

Sara Dietz

recently wrote about this, and I’ve also written about it previously. Letting ourselves become stressed, overwhelmed and burnt out from trying to do and buy All The Things in the attempt to create the Perfect Christmas, is ironically a pretty surefire way to spoil everyone’s Christmas.

You don’t have to go to Santa’s grotto.

You don’t have to buy the matching Christmas PJs.

You don’t have to spend a fortune buying mountains of gifts.

You don’t have to make a Christmas Eve box.

You don’t need to buy new and fancy decorations each year.

You don’t need perfectly curated tableware and napkins.

You don’t need Selfridge’s worthy gift wrapping skills and yards of ribbon.

You don’t have to do whatever it is that Instagram influencers are pushing this year as ‘the thing’ that will guarantee you a memorable Christmas.

None of these things are bad in themselves, and if some of them are cherished childhood memories then of course there is nothing wrong with making them part of your Christmas celebrations, but opting out of some (or all) of them is also totally ok.

Focusing on connection is a good thing, but on it’s own I don’t think it’s enough to cure us of our culture’s sick obsession with consumption and greed. In addition, we also have to remember the old adage that it is more blessed to give than to receive.

One of my favourite fictional depictions of Christmas is in Little Women, when Marmee encourages her daughters to give away their relatively modest Christmas feast to a destitute family in desperate want.

"Merry Christmas, little daughters! I'm glad you began at once, and hope you will keep on. But I want to say one word before we sit down. Not far away from here lies a poor woman with a little newborn baby. Six children are huddled into one bed to keep from freezing, for they have no fire. There is nothing to eat over there; and the oldest boy came to tell me they were suffering hunger and cold. My girls, will you give them your breakfast as a Christmas present?"

- Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge is condemned for his miserliness and lack of generosity towards his neighbours, for his hoarding of wealth whilst those around him suffered from want.

The Grinch might have had a heart that was two sizes too small, but he’s not wrong to condemn the Whos for their self-centred and consumerist celebrations, marked by competitiveness, envy, greed and pride.

Our entire economy is built on the back of envy, greed and discontent. We are advertised to constantly, encouraged to think we do not have enough, that if we just had more, then we would be happy. The antidote to a mindset of I don’t have enough is an attitude of generosity. Only somehow who believes they already have enough will give anything away.

There is an old English nursery rhyme that goes like this:

Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat

Please [do] put a penny in the old man's hat

If you haven't got a penny, [then] a ha'penny will do

If you haven't got a ha'penny, [then] God bless you!

The implication? That if Christmas is a time of plenty and feasting for you, then remember those for whom Christmas is a time of want, or simply a time of loneliness and isolation. My parents embodied this generosity of spirit, frequently extending invitations to Christmas dinner to single people in our Church community, whether they were elderly folks with no relatives, or foreign students far from home.

The UK is a wealthy country, yet over 320,000 households faced homelessness this year, with many many more struggling to afford the cost of housing and basic necessities. Let us be open hearted and open handed this Christmas. It might feel like we are powerless to effect meaningful change as individuals, but even small actions of kindness can make a difference to those around us. Donate to your local food bank, visit an elderly relative, extend an invitation to that one family member who you would maybe rather not include.

As Christmas approaches, and we head into those hectic final weeks, remember that you don’t have to partake in the merry go round of consumption. Make memories and cherish your familial traditions, but remember that our children long for and need our attention, attunement and presence more than they need the latest shiny toy or gadget.

Wishing you all a blessed Christmas and a Happy New Year,

Becca x

1. See

Brittany Chambers

recent piece “There’s so much waste and no one is getting happier” for some shocking data on exactly how wasteful and harmful our culture of excess consumption is.