I regret to inform you that the festive season is now unassailably upon us. Halloween, Bonfire Night, Christmas, New Year’s Eve. Now late into my fifth decade, I maintain a positive disposition towards only one of these.
Halloween was the first to fall off my list. Indeed, I cannot remember a time when it was ever really on it. In my youth, it barely registered. Costumes and trick or treating was not a thing. You might make an orange-tissue-paper-and-black-sugar-paper picture of a pumpkin at school that your parents could lovingly throw in the bin as soon as you got home, but that was about the size of it.
Now, of course, we have succumbed to the American way of things – great troupes of children now shake down entire streets for sweets, polyester costumes, pots of slime, plastic ghost buckets and little pumpkin torches fill the shops and, shortly thereafter, uncountable cubic miles of landfill, and schools have their pupils make broomsticks, articulated spiders and metres-wide webs that all have to be artfully curated at home where they take up more space than your actual family does.
New Year’s Eve, obviously, is an introvert’s nightmare. As soon as I was past my youthful peak (which I think was a Thursday in 1999) and realised it wasn’t actually mandatory to go out and mark the time when one date became another in as noisy and crowded a venue as possible and then remain stranded there by the absence of public transport for the rest of the night I began rhapsodically declining invitations and have not stopped since. Although the invitations have, which makes life even easier.
Christmas. Ah, Christmas. That one held on a long time. But gradually it became just another investment of work and stress for a diminishing return. With age, the nostalgia for your own childhood Christmases either fades or, in the light of adult hardships, accumulating bereavements and other sorrows, becomes painful to remember. Then there is the unignorable, inescapable bloating of the event itself. Mince pies in the shops before the leaves have even turned (before the bloody Halloween costumes are on the shelves in some cases, which is something of a convoluted double whammy).
But what these three all have in common is that they are now so deeply divorced from what once made them meaningful.
All Hallows Eve was once a part of the Christian calendar marking the remembrance of the dead (“hallows” are saints, but you could pay your respects to martyrs and to your own lost beloveds as well), with a dash of folkloric tradition thrown in to help keep you safe from less formally approved spirits too. The marking of the new year was a much more profound and necessary undertaking when we lived by the turning of the seasons, the rhythm of our daily individual and collective existence dictated entirely by the beautiful remorselessness of nature’s immutable timetable. And Christmas – well. It’s there that we can see the hollowing out of ancient traditions perhaps most clearly.
You don’t need to be religious (I am not and never have been) to mourn the increasing commercialism of a time that used to be about the birth of our Lord and Saviour (if you’re that way inclined) or at the very least a time to try and gather round home and hearth, take stock, give thanks, breathe and take just a moment to be conscious of your good fortune and remind yourself of – oh God, dread but true phrase coming up – what really matters in life.
Traditional festivities are increasingly less a chance to connect with the past, to feel that restorative sense of being a link in a chain of people stretching back generations, that commonality than they are a confrontation with the growing lack of meaning in life and the disjunction our astonishing age of technology has created between us and anything that led or shaped humanity up to this point. This is … not comforting.
Perhaps this is why Bonfire Night is now my favourite celebration of them all. Though it may not be the most ancient, it is the one most impossible to uncouple from its origins. The story of Guy Fawkes is still widely known, widely told and still – crucially – holds a child’s attention. Gunpowder! Treason! Plot! We may be losing the resonance of the Catholic/Protestant element, but the idea of fighting back against a government, penetrating the very belly of the beast and wishing to blow it sky high is not one that you could say has had its day. Which is at least a thought frightening enough to be appropriate to the season. Happy Halloween.