Joyce Fegan: The pressure for the perfect Christmas can ruin it

"This year the stakes have never been higher for Christmas. There's a lot riding on Christmas"

The scenes at the end of 'Love Actually'  where every creed and colour of a person is welcomed and embraced and loved by someone in an airport arrival hall, are in our psyche too.

There is a reason 'Fairytale of New York' is one of the most popular Christmas songs of all time. Its enduring popularity is in its poignancy; the hope for a better future ("I can see a better time when all our dreams come true"), and the regret of what-could-have-been a wonderful life ("I could have been someone").

Christmas is charged with hope and expectation, reunions, redemptions and reconciliations. If we spend 10 to 11 months leaning into our negativity bias, the human inclination to expect the worst, for some of November and most of December we are in our optimism bias.

The dial gets switched from RTÉ One, Newstalk, or 96FM to Christmas FM by the kids in the car or the kids in the kitchen. For weeks on end, all our brains ingest is  "it's the most wonderful time of the year", "have a holly, jolly Christmas", and "'tis the season to be jolly".

We are primed for perfection, perfect relations, a perfect Christmas  — a pressure that builds unconsciously over several weeks as you run around tying up loose ends in work.

Neighbours outdo each other with strips of outdoor fairy lights and projected light displays. Christmas hats and jumpers become acceptable attire all day, every day, and cars have reindeer antlers and noses attached to their roof and grill.

The pressure is all around.

And never more so than this year.

This year, the stakes have never been higher for Christmas. There's a lot riding on this Christmas.

We now have the usual expectations mixed with the fact that all of us have been living in some kind of isolation, loneliness, and restriction for months and months on end.

People are grappling with how they can make Christmas this year with no carol services or busking, no airport reunions, no work parties, no school pal get-togethers, and most importantly younger members of the family worrying about giving something to older parents or grandparents.

What's usually a time to drop the shoulders and exhale is now a time of mask-wearing on Grafton St with shoulders up around the ears, and tighter chests.

And we've been primed for the perfect Christmas going back years. The 1980s ESB ad with Alan Hughes being collected by his dad at the train station to the music of Dusty Springfield's 'Goin' Back' is etched in the Irish psyche, his mum at home turning on the electric blanket and taking the freshly-baked bread out of the oven.

The scenes at the end of Love Actually where every creed and colour of a person is welcomed and embraced and loved by someone in an airport arrival hall, are in our psyche too.

We've turned these wild geese homecoming into a new story with the annual footage on the Six One news or even whole hour-long documentaries of families and friends we don't know embracing in Dublin, Cork, and Shannon airports. We tear up at strangers' love.

The pressure is extreme.

Christmas, in normal times, always comes with a warning.

Family relations can be delicate and political and Christmas, with its reunions and dinners and parties always bringing those dynamics to the fore. With everyone primed unconsciously for a perfect Christmas, the expectation is that for once "we should all just be together, we all should get along". This hope can be a dangerous ideal that can just lead to more discord than accord.

There are children and adult children of separated and divorced parents, for whom Christmas is an entirely tense affair. The memories of discord and divorce, the trauma of it, is re-triggered by who's-going-where.

There are the relatives of those suffering alcoholism and addiction. And as anyone who has ever had a loved one with a substance abuse or alcohol problem knows, the pressure of Christmas seems to make everything far worse.

Domestic abuse helplines are busier too.

On the other side of the coin is the hope for redemption and reconciliation — etched in our psyche by that scene at the end of Home Alone with Old Man Marley, lifting up his estranged granddaughter into a grand embrace filled with emotion with Kevin watching on.

It's back to our once-a-year run with the optimism bias — while relations might be sour among loved ones 11 months of the year, there's hope that the magic of Christmas might forever transmute the stuff shoved under the carpet into water under the bridge.

And hope is a wonderful thing, and so is reconciliation and redemption, but let's not put all of that on one day in a 365-day calendar year, just because movies, music, and marketing says we should.

Another pressure in 2020 is The 'Gram — Instagram. People's feeds will be chockablock with beautifully-decorated trees, smiling families in matching pyjamas, girls with diamond rings on their wedding fingers, new babies dressed for their first Christmas, women with swollen bellies expecting their first baby.

The mindless scrolling but intense ingestion of these highly-charged images does have an effect, and come evening time your singlehood, your childlessness, your renter status, or your loneliness might be all you can think about and feel.

Christmas is a pressure-cooker of a time.

And this year we really need this festival of connection and celebration more than ever.

Our ancestors on this land, the Celts, long before Christianity, used this festival to meet and do something to overcome the darkest time in the year, December 21. Its purpose was to connect people and communities. It was pretty simple, before marketing got in the way.

After a year of living restrictedly, everyone needs some kind of a lift this Christmas.

Let's not allow the pressure for a perfect Christmas actually ruin Christmas.

Wherever you are, whoever you are, find one thing you can do to give yourself a lift. It doesn't have to be out of a movie script.

Let's make room for Christmases that suit everyone.