It’s a time for joyful indulgence in Nature’s bounties, writes Tom Hodgkinson

According to the great thundering Catholic writer GK Chesterton, George Bernard Shaw once called Christmas “a conspiracy kept up by poulterers and wine merchants.” This is rather a miserable puritanical view of the ancient festival. Chesterton quips that Shaw might as well say “that the two sexes were invented by jewellers who wanted to sell wedding rings”.

And, although, personally speaking, I like to consider myself as good an anti-consumerist as the next person, there is something joyful about poultry and wine and giving and receiving presents.

After all, there are limits to anti-consumerism. The wild-haired hermit in his cave doesn’t really enjoy God’s bounty. Milton in fact, perhaps surprisingly, attacks the notion of ascetic living in his poem “Comus”, where he sounds almost Elton John-like in his praise of buying stuff:

O foolishness of men! that lend their ears
To those budge doctors of the Stoic fur,
And fetch their precepts from the Cynic tub,
Praising the lean and sallow Abstinence!
Wherefore did Nature pour her bounties forth
With such a full and unwithdrawing hand,
Covering the earth with odours, fruits, and flocks,
Thronging the seas with spawn innumerable,
But all to please and sate the curious taste?

Milton is saying, “don’t live an ascetic life, like Diogenes the Cynic. Instead, enjoy the produce of the earth.” Christmas is a time to indulge in the odours, fruits and flocks that pour forth from Nature, and of course to please our “curious taste”. The wise men, we remember, presented Jesus with some quite pricey gifts.

It’s a time to behave like Chaucer’s good living Franklin:

His bread, his ale, were always good and fine
No man had cellars better stocked with wine
Without baked meat never was his house,
Or fish and flesh, and that in plenteous supply.
It snowed in his house of meat and drink.

Christmas is a feast and a festival, and festivals, above all else, are a celebration of inactivity, a time when the concerns of the so-called “real world” are suspended, and when we can allow ourselves to simply be, when we can reflect on God’s mystery, and forget the bustle (while dressing up, and being silly).

No less a thinker than Heidegger praised festivals as a time to be idle. “Celebrating,” he wrote, and he could have been writing about Christmas, “is a taking note, a questioning, a reflecting, an awaiting, passing over into the more wakeful intimation of wonder… to the festive there belongs radiance, and this radiance demands in turn demands of human beings adornment and ornamentation… To the radiance of celebration belong song and dance.”

Merchants in the 19th century, and before, may well have made the most of Christmas as a selling opportunity, as they do now. But to rail against the feast as an orgy of consumption is to miss the point. It’s a time when we should enjoy both consuming and doing nothing.

Add to that singing and dancing and playing games and you have the ideal twelve days of idling.

Merry Christmas and thanks as ever for supporting the Idler and all its doings.

PS My next newsletter will be on 4 January. Till then, stay idle.

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