Packing your Christmas decorations away? Think twice

I have two particularly reliable anxiety dreams. The first and slightly tamer of the two sees me at a party having the time of my life only to remember that I am 40, and I have left my children someplace else. The dream me tries desperately to sober up and find the party exit but when I do, it is revealed that I need to sit a uni exam on the way to the kids.

The second dream, and the more traumatic of the two, sees me return to the fancy department store where I worked one Christmas where I try, and fail, to gift-wrap at lightening speed while a hundred or so irate customers watch.

What if we let Christmas do Christmas for a little longer?Credit: Getty Images

This second dream hits especially hard during the Christmas period. Within seconds of closing my eyes I find myself back at the unnamed haunt (hint: not Myer) where I wrapped $200 onesies and had my fingers admired by a posh dude in boat shoes who really wanted me to take piano lessons. The final chapter of this particular hell was always December 24, when the many Christmas trees on display would be taken down ahead of the Boxing Day sales. There was no adjustment period, no moment which was actually Christmas, just the multitude of lit-up trees and then abruptly, their absence.

This aggressive seasonal transition has stayed with me well into adulthood and the timeliness of Christmas tree removal has become its own study. For what its worth, I’m inclined to think that keeping the tree on display until late January is the best way to really honour the season. Any time before that is simply too early and asks too much of us all. Depending on the level of earliness it might even be sociopathic.

Attending to this grim task on Boxing Day, for example, speaks to brute rationalism at the expense of empathy. It is like eating the expired family pet, or throwing out baby photographs because they are no longer relevant, or running a social media company. It is proof that what might make brutal sense in a commercial setting becomes disturbing in the domestic.

In my hippy/lapsed Catholic upbringing the decorations were left up until January 6 because of … something to do with the Epiphany? After this time, the tree would be moved out to the yard to be gradually burned off (this was the ’90s! Burning off was still cool). This seems, on paper, like a more respectful pace, but it is nonetheless premature. Most children are still home from childcare or school, and most adults are experiencing the emotional whiplash of the season.

Christmas is, of course, a stressful experience (particularly when there is a Joe Rogan-curious relative in the mix), but in addition to the financial and emotional strain of the holiday itself there is the crushing panic that accompanies the end of another year. There is the realisation that, “God, I’m doing this again, but this time a little bit older and a little bit uglier and a little bit closer to death and with possibility of nuclear war because our most important strategic ally keeps giving that lunatic access to nukes.”

Why not revel in existential crisis for a little while? Why not allow a decent mourning period both for what has been and what may shortly come?

There is also something gloriously anti-capitalist about keeping the tree up, about the retaining of something no longer of use, and (eventually) in a state of decay, for sentimental reasons. Let the Christmas tree stay up for January, its decorations falling off one piece at a time as its leaves become brown and crisp and it begins to wilt.

When it was mentioned, warning-shot style, to my children, that some time soon the decorations would need to come down, the news was met with the anticipated mutiny. Children, for whom time is entirely abstract, mark the progression of the year through holidays, and they could see no reason for the Christmas tree to be bumped unless something else was to take its place. Would it be Halloween soon, my son asked hopefully, or Easter?

In a moment of brilliance, I realised that January 26 would be upon us in a few weeks and that the Christmas tree could be utilised to mark that date. Both holidays are imported and European, and neither is the bastion of unity that the propaganda would have us believe. One decoration, two public holidays – even the most economically minded could not object to that. Perhaps those still attached to the term “Australia Day” could be convinced to call it Taking Down The Christmas Tree Day, a day where they get really into the Southern Cross paraphernalia, get wasted on pre-mixed drinks, troll their Greens-voting nephews on Facebook and pack away the baubles. Or, perhaps, you just drag the now thoroughly expired tree onto the nature strip, take a deep breath and finally accept that the new year has arrived.

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