I was going to revisit the surprisingly controversial piece I wrote last Christmas, in which I pointed out that domestic violence, suicide attempts and relationship breakdown peak over the “festive” season, and that the immense work of Christmas is primarily women’s work, unpaid and often unacknowledged. I was going to remind you about the extreme social pressure added to households in poverty by the expectations of Christmas consumption; the way children are weaponised in advertising to make us feel that better parents spend more money; how very hard the coming weeks are for folk with difficult relationships with food and drink.
I was going to challenge Christmas, as much as one person can in 700 words, and advocate for gentler, more inclusive, modes of celebration, ones that recognise the primacy of friendship over family in many people’s lives, ones that make space for the pain and difficulty of many family dynamics. I was going to argue for the sharing of food whose preparation as well as consumption brings pleasure, for the fairer distribution of the work of celebration, for a scaling down of excess and the outright rejection of the restrictions we will be sold come January. It doesn’t have to be this way, I was going to say, just do the bits you actually enjoy, nothing bad will happen.
(That wouldn’t have been true; part of the problem is that rejection does very much cause offence. Most of us probably have or know people who have risked their own and their children’s lives driving hundreds of miles in wintry weather and darkness in an attempt to placate grandparents and siblings on both sides, arriving shaken and in dread of the return trip and also secretly longing to go home.)
As I was drafting such an article, trying to balance saying what is often repressed or denied about the harms of the way we mark Christmas with hope for more generous ways of making light in the darkness, I found a phrase coming insistently to my mind: “I was worst to him I loved most.”
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I knew where the line was from. When I lived in Iceland, a wise older friend used to quote it often. Gudrun, the strong and beautiful central character of the 13th-century Laxdæla Saga, marries four times and raises two sons. She has a long, tempestuous life in the very interesting times of Iceland’s first centuries, and in old age her son asks her which man she loved most. That’s her response.
Gudrun’s utterance doesn’t seem immediately relevant to Christmas in Ireland in 2025, but the phrase kept coming back to me and after a while I worked out why. Violence, breakdown and suicide peak at Christmas when the cracks were already there and the intensifying of pressure over the holidays breaks them wide open. But the smaller kinds of damage, the little harms we do each other when the curtains are drawn and the fire lit, in the pressure-cooker privacy of the car or the spare room, are what I have in mind. The stress of confinement and impossible expectation comes out in small bubbles of spite produced by guilt and resentment.
If there is violence, coercive control, substance misuse and/or despair in your household, you should of course seek help and take steps to avoid or at least mitigate the national lock-in/lockdown that is Christmas. There’s a spectrum from those situations to the idyll of the mutually adoring family gathering to share equally in unalloyed hours and days of merriment, with no thought of irritation or resentment or anything but cosy intergenerational bliss. (Someone somewhere maybe?)
Most families live between those extremes, and most of us are worst to those we love best. I don’t for a moment think that love means never having to say you’re sorry. Love means having the grace and space to say sorry as frankly and often as necessary, and more importantly working seriously to stop doing the things about which we are sorry. But people do tend to behave worse at home, among family, than with friends and colleagues, and maybe it’s a useful idea that we might rise to our midwinter festivity by being best to those we love best, by meeting the individual needs and desires of our individual people in their particular situations rather than striving to perform an ideal that is costly in every way.
