I love Christmas and everything that goes with it: the decorations, the presents, the music, the socialising and the shameless excess. It's the summer of the soul in December, as the Muppets once sang - a warm glow of joy amid that cheerless gulf that begins in autumn and ends in spring.
Try as we might, we can never recapture the magic of a childhood Christmas. Our sense of wonder fades with age and we lose the ability to be enchanted by the small things: the sparkle of tinsel, the novelty of once-a-year customs, the thought of Santa tiptoeing through the house. Plus, gift-getting is less beguiling when you can afford to buy things for yourself and can no longer get away with being unapologetically selfish.
It seems to me the Christmas we reminisce about and try to resurrect each year belongs to an age that ended sometime in the 1990s – perhaps because this is when the world began to take on a look and feel that is familiar today. The warm glow of remembrance is generally reserved for different, simpler times, not a dog-eared version of the here-and-now.
Christmases of yore were chintzy and cheap, but that was their charm. The gaudy decorations, tacky gifts and blurry snapshots of yesteryear contained more authenticity than anything found in the big-budget, pixel-perfect modern Christmas. Perhaps no one has recorded a decent Christmas single lately because we’ve lost the ability to be so cheerfully uncool. Then again, maybe we lacked the means to be anything else back then, and progress has cost us our appreciation of modest pleasures.
Progress has also made the world a smaller place. We are connected as never before to other people, inundated with a constant flow of news and information, able to document our lives and swap opinions from anywhere on the planet. This is a far cry from when teenagers relied on letters, magazines and radios to reach beyond their provincial bedrooms – lines of communication that made the world feel bigger for being so insubstantial.
This was the Britain of my youth in the 1980s. The country was still a grey, parochial place – a land of YTS schemes, picket lines and Findus Crispy Pancakes. Entertainment was four TV stations watched on a square wooden box. Offices were smoke-filled places, full of typewriters and casual sexism. Politics was a battleground, stalked by Tory radicals and Labour Trots. And above everything loomed the Cold War and the threat of armageddon.
No wonder feel-good pop music was so pervasive at the time. People needed a little colour in their lives, and those sun-drenched videos, garish hair-dos and ridiculous outfits provided the perfect tonic. Who wouldn't want to visit Club Tropicana or holiday on Duran Duran’s yacht when there were three million unemployed and nuclear oblivion was a four-minute warning away?
The Eighties also represented a tipping point, from a Britain steeped in custom and heritage to a modern, forward-looking nation. For the young, it was an especially thrilling time, because popular culture was pitched more squarely at them than ever before. A technological revolution saw computers, microwaves and video recorders becoming commonplace in people’s homes, and all this razzamataz was sufficiently baffling to the older generation to suggest a line had been drawn in the sand. It was the dawning of a new era that belonged to the young.
This is significant, because our way of life until then had been largely dictated by that older generation. Most World War Two veterans were barely out of middle-age, and their interests and experiences loomed large in our lives. They respected the past and its achievements, and paid tribute to them through the preservation of everything from our social norms to our architecture, providing a sense of continuity from one age to the next.
I am reminded of this by a moment from my childhood. I was seated by the window of my school classroom, enjoying the warmth of an old cast-iron radiator set beneath. In places, the paint had been chipped away from the metal, revealing ancient layers that marked the passing of the years like the rings on a tree. It occurred to me that some of the caretakers who had applied this paint were long dead, and that the hundreds of children who had sat in this spot before me were now grown men, or had already completed life’s journey. That radiator and that classroom were links between me in the present and the events of the past, and made me feel part of a story bigger than myself.
This conservation of what has stood the test of time has fallen out of fashion. The balance between healthy progress and preserving the best of who we already are has been replaced by a belief that the past is a country best forgotten. It's not just unpleasant attitudes and practices that have been kicked into touch. We've given up something more important: our sense of togetherness, spontaneity and fun.
Perhaps the nostalgia that consumes us at this time of the year is the response of people who feel that, in the march of progress, they have left something behind. Technology has made it easier for us to stay connected but has enabled us to keep each other at arm’s length. None of this is conducive to the joyous, devil-may-care attitude that characterises Christmas, which is probably why we still celebrate it so passionately each year. It’s a chance to throw off our inhibitions and be who we used to be.
So, to borrow from Ebeneezer Scrooge, honour Christmas in your heart and try to keep it all the year. Live in the past, the present and the future. The spirits of all three shall strive within you. Do not shut out the lessons that they teach.
