Ever since we were born into the world as codependent, naïve, crying babies, our parents realised they had a lot of work to do in order to make us learn about the world’s rights and wrongs, and most of all to make us shut up. The endless commandments of childhood taught us about how to annoy other people in the least possible way, how to delude others with convincing fairytales, and most importantly, how not to die in a world full of danger. But to every rule, you’ll find at least one exception. Only a couple of times a year, parents abandon half of what they put hard work into teaching their children, and exchange sensibility for fairy lights, and healthy meals for a balanced diet between powdered sugar and mulled wine. Forget everything you know about caution, reason and rationality! We’re about to get drunk on over-consumption and consumerism, while slowly getting the life sucked out of ourselves and our bank accounts thanks to capitalism disguised in red, green and white costumes! Prepare yourselves for the jolliest season of them all: Christmas is coming.
If you’ve had a fairly reasonable upbringing, your parents probably told you not to talk to strangers, let alone accept any gifts from them. I guess it’s easier to protect your children when you make them believe that every stranger is a possible enemy (because that’s never resulted in prejudice or conflicts between people. But hey, I’m sure they’ll get to sort that out with their therapists at some point later on in life). As kids we obviously don’t think about grooming cases, kidnapping, criminal pedophilia or other ways in which children can be in danger just by existing. So when you’re wired to be automatically suspicious of everyone you meet, in theory you should be less likely to trust them and follow them in their black car with tinted windows. Sounds quite effective to me. Why is it then that for a couple of weeks a year, parents are completely comfortable with deluding their children to think that every guy in the exact same costume is in fact the same jolly, good-hearted person that’s going to bring them presents if only they behave well? In any other scenario, a middle-aged guy in disguise trying to give your kids chocolate or make them sit on his lap to hear about their wishes would look more than just a little suspicious. But I guess red, green and white are the traffic lights of Christmas telling you to just go ahead blindly: Just put your trust in Santa, and you can be sure that he’s got his roads cleared for you.
We all lose our minds during the holidays. No other season has such a massive impact on our sanity and our children’s safety, and nevertheless we let it take over our lives instead of isolating ourselves from society as every other sensible person would do. It’s such a stressful time, no wonder we abandon our rationality. Only people in limbo can make it through it all unscathed. In order to achieve a state of invincible high, we reach out for little helpers that either live inside of a bottle or are covered in sugar. Only because we’re not high enough to be that irresponsible, parents give their kids advent calendars instead of a career in alcoholism. At any other time of the year, it would be absolutely unheard of to have a chocolate-y appetiser before breakfast, but it’s Christmas time! The rules have changed! What can possibly go wrong when you give your kids a little piece of delicious rebellion against what they’ve been taught is good for them by letting them start the day on a high sugar note? Every piece of chocolate looks all nice and friendly, smiling at your kid as they wake up and their blood sugar spikes. Perhaps parenting becomes easier when their kid is on a safe road to obesity, as it gets a little harder to fight back when you break out in a sweat every time you try to punch back.
The most surprising part is that all these rules that are turned upside down during the Christmas season are immediately reversed as soon as fireworks and bubbles announce the New Year. One would surely assume that if you’ve made someone get used to a new set of rules for a whole month, they’d continue living according to their new normal. But not in this case. I told you that nothing makes sense anymore. Maybe it’s because our brains are finally released from being stuck in a loop of hearing the same six popular Christmas songs, so we can go back to normality. From a kid’s perspective, it could be that the ending of his advent calendar and leftovers from his family’s Christmas feasts clearly indicate that a month full of rebellious fun is over, and that it’s time to rest now. After all, it must be exhausting to get used to new, contradictory rules that suddenly make sense only because your parents tell you so. That’s a lot to take in for a kid. Cleaning up after a month of a big celebratory binge doesn’t exactly encourage anyone to do it all over again anytime soon, so maybe it’s quietly accepted by big and small, young and old, that the madness doesn’t start again until another couple of months to come.
