Binge in December, purge in January.
Or at least, that’s the way Britain normally does Christmas: a brief splurge of shopping, partying and stuffing our faces, before waddling into new year skint, hungover and carrying an extra half a stone. Boris Johnson is clearly a stickler for tradition, to judge from early briefings about a superspreader Yule in which up to three households could be allowed to mingle for up to five days and to hell with the consequences for intensive care units. But is a big blowout, paid for by yet more lockdown when the R number inevitably surges, really what we want this year?
January is horrible enough as it is: a season of divorce lawyers, diets and regrets. But to afford a “normal” Christmas with all the trimmings this year, it’s going to be January for months. Next week we’re likely to emerge from the current lockdown into a stricter version of the tiered semi-lockdowns that were in force before it, and stay there or thereabouts until a critical mass of Britons are vaccinated. With luck, that might mean March.
The government reportedly expected to face a “mutiny of mums” if it didn’t unlock for December, but an Opinium poll for this weekend’s Observer found over half of the public would rather have a locked-down Christmas with fewer restrictions, with broad agreement across demographics. All the way through this pandemic, a government whose own instincts tend to the libertarian have consistently assumed the nation to be more gung ho than it actually is, and I suspect may have done so again.
After a long, hard, tedious year, I thought I’d want nothing more than a reassuringly big family Christmas with all the trimmings, but have begun to surprise myself by craving novelty instead. We have been warned for so long not to expect a “normal” Yule that people have started to make plans for reinventing it; to think about duck instead of turkey, or stringing up a Santa piñata and whacking the hell out of it with a stick, or making a picnic Christmas lunch and going for a long hike instead (as the broadcaster Kate Humble apparently does). It’s not as if we’ve been short of opportunities this year to comfort eat while slumping in front of the telly, after all.
I like the sound of the Independent Sage committee’s suggestions for socially distanced Christmas parties too, with everyone coming out on their doorsteps for mince pies and mulled wine, plus this year’s trend for putting the tree up in November and to hell with it. Singletons can already form household bubbles under the current lockdown rules, meaning they don’t have to be on their own, and we could start thinking creatively now about fall-back arrangements for those who don’t have friends and family to bubble with. And yes, some people will break the rules, whatever the rules are. But for every party animal there will be older people frightened of straying too far, and cautious families who will stop short of whatever they’re technically allowed to do out of concern for a vulnerable member.
Not everyone celebrates Christmas, of course, and those forced to mark Passover or Eid or Diwali at a distance this year have every right to wonder why this festival is different. Not everyone has happy family memories of it, either; for some, it’s just three tense days of catering round the clock while papering over old wounds, and trying to steer the in-laws off the subject of Brexit.
One reason talks between the four UK nations on a common set of Christmas rules have taken so long, meanwhile, may be that some parts of the country have more to lose than others from letting people merrily skip between high- and low-infection areas. There’s no point Scotland and Wales taking a more cautious approach than England all year, only to squander their hard-won gains in one big seasonal blowout.
There is, in short, no one-size option that fits all. But it’s ridiculous to pretend the choice is between a miserable, killjoy Christmas under house arrest and a week of full-blown bacchanalia. There’s a middle ground, for heaven’s sake, between the two, and it involves a smaller Christmas than usual but not necessarily a worse one; a slightly different December, followed perhaps by a January with fewer regrets.
• Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
