Post-Festive Relief

So, the festive season is pretty much done and dusted for another year.  The leftovers are finally gone, the Christmas tree is visibly drooping, and the diet adverts have started yet again on TV.  Although facing a brand new 365 days with a gaping hole in my bank balance and a lingering headache is an all too familiar feeling, this year round I have a strange post-festive relief.  Now don’t get me wrong, I love Christmas – not to mention New Year – as much as the next girl, but for a change I’m approaching the sober month of January with a smile.  For a while at least, there are no more presents to buy, and the city centre won’t be rammed every weekend with stressed shoppers arguing over the last selection box.  I more than likely won’t end up wasting £2.99 on Wetherspoon’s poor and more than slightly acidic attempt at mulled wine in search of ‘Christmas spirit,’ and I certainly won’t have to face any more family politics round the dinner table.  For a few months at least. 

Spurred on by my New Year glow, and slightly smug at having a reason to be so cheerful this January, I began to wonder if anyone feels the same.  I quickly realised that being happy at the death of the festive period isn’t exactly unusual.  For thousands of people, Christmas and New Year are far from joyful, with rates of depression and suicide peaking in the month of December.  So why does this thick fog of gloom descend on a time that’s meant to be full of fun?  There too many reasons to write about, but to be honest I’m sure that most of us can sympathise with feeling a bit blue towards the end of the year.  Sometimes all the festivities can give you that urge to crawl under the duvet with a cup of tea (or hot toddy if you’d rather) and not emerge until January is well underway.

For starters, sleigh-bell filled adverts telling us how to have the ‘perfect family Christmas’ begin to blare from our screens in mid-October.  It’s all very well when you have a family who get on like a house on fire, but probably not a reality for most of us.  Going home for Christmas can be great, but for those with less-than-perfect families, or those without family at all, it’s a pretty daunting prospect.  All the pressure on perfection at this time of year is enough to make anyone feel a bit down, and self-doubt can creep up all too easily when everyone else seems to be having the time of their lives.  Something I noticed this year was the label of ‘Scrooge’ that we’re all too quick to plaster on anyone less-than enthused about the approaching holiday.  A few of my flatmates who questioned the need to tune the radio to Smooth Xmas from the end of November were very quickly shouted down; any reluctance to cover the kitchen with tinsel was met with nothing short of hostility.  I’m not saying that getting into the Christmas spirit is the cause of this festive depression.  But reading about how 45% of people dread the season made me wonder how much of the over-enthusiasm is genuine.  If you’re already feeling slightly wobbly about the holidays, having ‘Scrooge!’ shouted in your face whenever you try to tell anyone about it probably doesn’t help.  The media’s over-commercialised, over-sentimentalised projections of Christmas must spark off that sinking feeling in hundreds of stomachs.  And the fact that we all try and do the normal thing by buying into it probably just makes it worse.

So having thought long and hard about Christmas, I turned my thoughts to New Year.  This year, my mum spent New Year’s Eve by herself, quite happily watching a three-star movie on Film Four with a glass of vino.  Now don’t get me wrong, she has plenty of friends – and had got quite a few of offers of things to do – she just really didn’t mind being alone for a change.  Now after getting over my initial shock that anyone would want to be by themselves on what Evolution heralds as ‘The Biggest Night Of The Year!’ I realised that she probably had a better night than me.  After getting slightly disheartened at the fact that nothing was really happening in my town for New Year, I ended up tagging along to a party with my boyfriend.  The night was fun, predictable, more than slightly drunken – but I couldn’t get over the fact that I was only there to avoid having nothing to do.  And this is precisely my point.  Over Christmas, the lengths we go to in order to avoid doing nothing often see us reluctantly saying yes to stuff we’d rather not.  Social pressures have become such that if you’re on your own (or at least without Facebook photos to show how much fun you’ve been having) at any point in the festive period, you end up feeling like you’ve somehow failed.

So, maybe you can sympathise with my seasonal sense of relief.  In looking at how many people have insecurities at this time of year, I can see that the majority of the population suffer a lot worse than me.  But most importantly I’ve come to the conclusion that we shouldn’t be so ashamed of doing what we want to do.  January brings with it permission for staying under the covers with a cuppa, for wearing thermal socks instead of heels, and most importantly for re-discovering the joys of sober conversation.  And the expenses and excesses of Christmas are things I think we can all do without for another eleven months.  Looking back, and at the experiences of others, it’s pretty clear that feeling rubbish about the holidays is more normal than anything.  And it’s about time we felt okay to say it.  Here’s to a happy, healthy (and maybe just a little bit more self-assured) 2012!