A December missive
Grey days, joyful reunions, and the delight of being seen
It’s been dark and rainy in London for most of the past few weeks; storms big enough to have names of their own keep sweeping through, sending public transit into disarray and blowing rubbish and dead leaves up and down our street. With scarcely a week left until the holidays, I have a sense that I should be preparing, getting my house and my work in order, but, most days, the animal part of me has wanted nothing more than to curl up somewhere warm and sleep.
Last week, I went out for drinks with a group of work friends and stayed late catching up with two former colleagues, one of whom now lives far away and was in town for just a few days. The three of us all do very similar jobs, and there was a particular kind of joy in talking to someone who understands exactly what it is you do, a feeling of mutual support and solidarity. We’d met for a similar reunion this time last year, and there was something about this sense of ritual, along with the fire in the hearth of the crowded pub where we met, that made me feel that the festive season (and not just the Christmas shopping season) had really begun.
The next day was cold but clear, the first sunny day in what felt like ages, and I went out for a walk and ended up buying a wreath to hang on the front door. Back at home, I pulled out our small box of Christmas decorations – a few ornaments, paper chains I’d made out of old Time Out magazines back when they handed them out at every tube station, and the tiny, artificial tree that we’d bought at the corner shop on the morning that Tier-4 lockdown was announced in 2020. Part of the plastic stand for the tree had snapped off, and I duct-taped it back together, feeling virtuous and thrifty. Within 48 hours, the repair had failed, the tree collapsed, and I sloped off to Argos to buy a replacement.
I tried not to engage too much with the Black Friday sales this year, aiming to buy only a few practical items that I’d been waiting to go on sale, but it didn’t take much for my resolve to weaken, and I impulsively bought a bright blue woolly hat and a new red bag. This isn’t so bad, really, but at this time of year it feels like spending can easily snowball: when I’m buying something that I’ve thought about and planned for, it’s so tempting to add just one more item to the cart; or to pick up something for myself when I’m shopping for a gift for someone else. I am lucky enough to already have everything that I truly need, and I make an effort to shop thoughtfully, to buy secondhand where I can, but who among us is invulnerable to the shiny and new?
The internet seems to be flooded with gift guides this year, maybe more so than ever before, and I’m unsure what I think of them. As someone who loves window-shopping and looking at beautiful things, I’m drawn to them, but the onslaught of product recommendations feels icky at times, all these voices telling us to buy, buy, buy. It can be hard to unpick the Christmas-shopping frenzy from the act of gift-giving itself, but I don’t want to suggest that the practice of exchanging gifts is morally bankrupt. At its best, giving and receiving gifts is about more than the acquisition of stuff; it’s about surprise and delight, seeing and being seen. The best gifts show you that the giver has been paying attention to you, that they understand your interests and tastes, while the worst ones reveal that they have no idea who you are.
This principle was affirmed for me earlier today when my friend Kate and I discovered that we were both planning to order one another the same t-shirt from the podcast Sentimental Garbage; because the t-shirt is being sold through a platform that works on a pre-order model, with all the shirts shipping out at the same time, I’d sent her a check-in text asking about her holiday travel plans, trying to see whether she would be home when the t-shirt arrived. When she told me that my Christmas gift was dispatching same day, the jig was up – and this somehow felt even better, funnier, and far more delightful than if we had managed to surprise each other.