The days of Christmas orgies may be over but that's no reason not to spoil yourself this year, writes Kevin Myers
The next time you hear someone saying that they can't bear Christmas; that it's all so commercial; that it has lost its true meaning because it no longer celebrates the birth of Jesus, take this piece of advice - conceal a Christmas tree about .ing rubber gloves will find it. For Christmas is as it should be, the noble heir to the pagan feast of Saturnalia. The early Christian fathers, being shrewd old dogs, were well aware of the human need to have a mid-winter orgy at around the time of the shortest day; so they took the old pre-Christian festivities and bolted the birth of the infant Jesus onto them.
In the early days of Christmas, it was probably the grizzled old pagans who despaired at the decline in values associated with the mid-winter orgy. Human sacrifice was almost a thing of the past; the elders of the tribe no longer had the pick of the maidens on Saturnalia Eve; group sex was becoming disgracefully rare with this new-fangled Christmas; and instead of feasting on venison and getting legless on mead, people were going round in twee little clusters babbling mysteriously in a ceremony called carol-singing. God be with the old days, when Saturnalia still had real traditional values.
Saturnalia was of course the Roman name; the Old Norse called their midwinter feast jol, or as we know it today, yule, which lasted 12 days. Sound familiar? Of course, much paganism has been retained in Christmas. The holly, the ivy, the mistletoe and the family fight, usually based on largely forgotten grudges left over from previous Christmases: and if that fails to arouse some conflict, charades or Scrabble can always be relied on to demolish the myths of the season of goodwill.
In other words, Christmas is merely the assassination of the archduke which brings those simmering family differences to a crackling outbreak, with drawn swords over the pudding, and pistols amidst the crackers. This is a very good thing indeed, a highly necessary purging of the emotions which is as much part of the mid-winter ritual as reindeer and mince pies, but never, ever snow.
Actually, that's not true. Four years ago, we did actually get a white Christmas, the first of my life; life finally conforming with myth. For Christmas is about myth, about the belief that there was a better time, when Christmas was properly observed, not like today, when it has become so debased.
But Christmas has been commercialised since the 19th century, and commerce means cost, and cost means sacrifice. That's how society declares something important, and today's sacrifice is measured in time spent in shopping malls and emptying bank balances; a considerably smaller sacrifice proportionately than in the days of the Saturnalia.
Everyone thinks their childhood Christmas was special, and indeed it was - but only to them. Moreover, I remember at the end of every Christmas Day, with the wrappings of the presents for eight Myerses covering the floor, and my little belly full of turkey and pudding, thinking that this Christmas hadn't been quite as good as last Christmas. In my childhood, I was merely rehearsing the central emotional feature of Christmas, a belief that things were better in the past.
They weren't. The truth is my childhood home was kept "warm" - the term is elastic enough to include frozen ice inside the bedroom window panes when we woke up - by a coal-fire in the sitting room and one in the dining room, which were laid by my mother at seven each morning. We had paraffin stoves in the hall and the landing to battle futilely with the oceans of cold air that swirled throughout the house. What is the smell which instantly propels me to the Christmas of my childhood? Not turkey, not plum pudding, not the odour of burning brandy, but the fumes of Esso Blue.
Some readers won't have the faintest idea of what "Esso Blue" is. Lucky readers. The past is not a better place. It was a terrible place, as we are discovering with dreadful regularity, and Christmases were certainly not better than they are now.
Christmas for the poor meant the parents scrimping and saving for months in order to buy Christmas dinner and maybe a second-hand present for each child. The sacrifices which we ceaselessly moan about - the horrors of the traffic jams and the supermarkets - are as nothing compared to the sacrifices made by earlier generations to ensure that Christmas was celebrated properly.
Yes, of course, children are nowadays overwhelmed with presents, and have become utterly blasé about gifts, et cetera et cetera et bloody cetera. But that's the world we live in; it is already a world of excess, and Christmas merely celebrates that excess with more excess. We cannot make children immune to the defining features of our modern society.
Is it a shame? Well, sort of, but only sort of. What is the alternative? A society which celebrates Christmas modestly with an orange each is almost certainly one with rickets, scurvy and bad breath.
I haven't mentioned Jesus in a while. Well, I can't deny he has a part in it all. The legends of Bethlehem certainly add a magical patina to our need for some outrageous mid-winter carnality. We express our Christian devotion through some of the most beautiful melodies ever composed and carol services and midnight Mass provide amongst the most haunting ceremonies of the year. But how much of those ceremonies are really about celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ, and how much are they actually personal exercises in celebrating life, of reviving memories, of thinking about a vanished childhood and lost loved ones? These rites serve to remind, replenish and renew; Jesus comes a distant fourth in the Christmas memory-stakes.
And most of us don't associate the sound of carols with Jesus in his stable, but with supermarkets and with Hollywood films about Christmas. The American version of Christmas has entered our group imagination, and indeed our own individual minds; it is as if we too have lived in small-town USA with Jimmy Stewart, and can even half-remember that distant Christmas Eve of It's A Wonderful Life. Hollywood's fictions have colonised our brains, and enabled us to share a communal and entirely fictional Christmas of the past, with sleigh-bells sounding over the snow, and carol-singers with lanterns walking our streets, ice-skaters weaving patterns over our frozen lakes.
But before Hollywood, there was a healthy market for seasonal imagery. The Dutch masters pioneered the Christmas logo of the ice-skaters, and copies of paintings of skating parties with their hands in muffs and boys with long scarves being chased by excited dogs were sold right across Europe in the 19th century. Dickens was of course a great mythologiser of Christmas, and the Dickens Christmas is also present in our communal perception. Indeed, I'm particularly fond of that myth; I love the Christmas cards of the Victorian coach-and-four entering a snow-covered Englishe towne, the post horn sounding at the back, with yet more boys with long scarves, plus dog, scampering in its wake.
Yes, of course, there are the serious Christmas cards; a Leonardo, say, of the Madonna, or one of those countless Italian jobs, with a pre-circumcised Jesus usually being the proud possessor of a quite magnificent hosepipe of foreskin. If there are cherubim playing in the roof-beams, the chances are that their prepuces are intact also. You'd think, wouldn't you, that baby angels in the land of the Jews would have made a trip to the rabbi and his blade? Of course, the artists were subscribing to their own mythology of the period, that of the Gentile Jesus, meek and mild, in which even the angels of Judea are non-Jews. For it was important for Italians of the Renaissance to portray Jesus as a little Florentine or Roman, which in their minds he clearly was.
So, we can tell ourselves that Christmas is about Christ, but it's not; it's about the particular myths which bind us. It's about who and what we are, who our friends are and who we love, and moreover, whom we pretend to love. We might end up loving even fewer people after the furious row over the last and decisive word in the drunken game of Scrabble - THERE IS NO SUCH WORD AS EL! YES THERE F***ING IS IN AMERICAN ENGLISH. WE ARE NOT F***ING SPEAKING AMERICAN ENGLISH.
For Christmas games always mean Christmas disputes; though I remain mystified by the wholly unjustified indignation in one game of Christmas charades over the celebrated book title which I gave my friend Jessica to enact: The Story Of The Fourth Army In The Battles Of The Hundred Days, August 8th and November 11 1918, as you all well know, by Maj Gen Sir Archibald Montgomery KCMG CB. Why, I didn't even insist on the author's name, though I could quite reasonably have done so. As you'll agree, it couldn't have been easier. Yet amazingly, she failed to enact this title in the allotted time; and after a brief but vigorous altercation, I found myself exiled to the kitchen to wash the glasses, a surprising number of which simply leapt off the draining board of their own accord: a complete mystery, for I, of course, was as sober as the baby Jesus himself.
Which brings us to another key to Christmas; it is that it is constantly evolving. A central feature of Christmas up until recent times was the washing up; who does it? For washing up consumed much of the day, amid an ocean of lather and grease in which one could have concealed a small elephant, and leave no trace. But what was once a vital part of Christmas has now been banished by the dishwasher. Stacking the machine can never beget the spectacular rows that washing and drying up unfailingly did: "Oh come on, you can't possibly call that clean," and "Look you're drying up, not restoring a bloody Rubens". And a speedy washer-up could create a tip-head of dripping dishes on the draining board; one nudge, and dear me, how we'd all laugh.
There are children today who have never washed dishes in their lives, never mind on Christmas Day. And they're missing nothing. Indeed, there are few things about my childhood Christmases which I can confidently declare are better than Christmas for young people today. My poor father believed differently; he was absolutely convinced that the turkey of his Dublin childhood, basted before an open fire, tasted far better than one cooked in the oven.
One Christmas he insisted that we cook the turkey that way, and for hours and hours the Myers children queued in shifts to turn and baste the bird, meanwhile keeping the fire at just the right pitch. My father was not a young man, but even he wasn't old enough to remember the last time people were able to baste expertly before an open fire; it had been about the time when Saturnalia became Christmas.
The turkey was a disaster, burnt on the outside, and looking like something fed to lions in a zoo on the inside. "And that's the way it always was when we were children," remembered my Aunt Nell sadly, when told about it. Few things are quite as pleasing to children as a parental disaster; and Lord, we cocky little Myerses ridiculed our father for how he'd ruined the family Christmas, while he brooded silently over the lumps of raw meat on our plates.
However, there are some parts of Christmas which have repeated themselves as long as I've been celebrating Christmas. The first is that people complain how early Christmas has started this year; and the second is people shake their heads in dismal disbelief that yet another Christmas is at our throats. "I can't believe it's a whole year." So it was with our yuletide forefathers and our Saturnalian foremothers as they prepared for the fireside orgy with some close cousins, that nice man who clubbed the mammoth to death and his rather hairy wife, plus the Joneses from the rath down the way. It's just amazing how quickly it comes round, says Mrs Caveman, shaking her head as she sheds the pelt and beckons Mr Jones over.
The speed of the season returning will never change, for Christmas is like a clock chiming over our lives, and each year the chimes always seem to come too soon, until one day they don't come again. Five weeks after we had so jubilantly mocked my father for his "ruining" our family Christmas, he was dead.
It is the certainty of bereavement sooner or later which gives to Christmas that melancholy aroma, its edge of menace, even at its most joyful, for there is an abiding sense that sooner or later those who are spared bereavement will instead themselves bereave. All the more reason then to be generous, and to enjoy ourselves at the festive season, with as much vulgarity and display as possible, with the nagging thought throughout that this Christmas isn't as good as last Christmas.
Our need to celebrate with our eye on a lost past predates Jesus Christ and Christianity. Indeed, it probably goes back to the fons et origo of all nostalgia, our exile from Eden.