It always makes me cringe when August comes and the supermarkets have an aisle with the barbeques and charcoal for the summer and they start bringing in the Christmas stuff right next to it. From then onwards we are bombarded by Christmas jingles and songs, the same old songs repeated and recycled year after year. Christmas is just one day but it seems we spend half the year looking forward to Christmas (or not as the case may be) and the other half paying for it and adverts all year round telling us about schemes to save money for it so we never really escape it.

It’s sad that in today’s society people feel they need to get up to their eyeballs in debt to have a good Christmas. Do we need to spend so much money to be happy? Christmas should be a time to see those relatives you haven’t seen for ages and to spend time with your loved ones not a competition to see who can spend the most money on impersonal gifts. Does spending so much money even make us happy? We put pressure on ourselves to spend money that we don’t have, we eat so much that we put on weight, we spend the season with a hangover and still have to look good at the new years party.

Modern day Christmas seems to have made a farce and a mockery out of the original beliefs and ideals behind it. According to the bible, the first ever Christmas and the birth of Jesus was in a stable where he was laid in a manger. Surely this is about the poverty of Christ, the message being that miracles can come from humble beginnings and that you don’t need wealth to be happy.

 So how did we get from that to stuffing ourselves with much more food than we could possibly ever need, draining the savings for the latest game console and drinking ourselves silly? We seem to be getting further and further from the traditional sense of religion into a new one worshipping capitalism and greed where happiness comes from money and love is measured by the amount of money you can spend on someone.