ššJoy Isnāt Sustainableā¢ : A Christmas essay on memory, meaning, and middle fingers. Act: 1 of 3.
š„ RSOā¢ Entry 008 - Rituals, rage, and the fight to keep joy unbranded.
In a world that commodifies every form of joy, preserving a ritual isnāt quaint. Itās rebellion. Itās resistance. Itās one of the last things that still belongs to you.
Itās nearly December. I used to love Christmas. Kinda still do. Itās just not what it used to be. Like a lot of things.
Everywhere you look, joy is being sold back to us as content.
Celebration becomes performance. Meaning becomes branding. And if your version of joy canāt be packaged, monetised, or cropped into a clean aesthetic? It gets mocked, shamed, or sterilised. Weāre told itās childish. Immature. Wasteful. āNot sustainableā. āNot elegantā.
But thereās a deeper war going on here and ritual is how we fight back.
Journal prompt: Whatās worth keeping, even when the world tells you to give it up?
My dad was the one in the family who threw the parties. Family and friends, all ready to scrap over the last vol-au-vent or prawn cocktail. Classic council estate childhood nostalgia right there.
Leading up to Christmas, we didnāt just have traditions ā we had rituals. Rituals we never missed. And rituals I looked forward to every single year.
Most of them have died to death now.
But Iām going to walk you through three of them. To show you how each one makes me, in present day, hate people just a little bit more.
The kind of rage that forms when your memories are dismissed as waste. When your joy is framed as immaturity and someone claps for that.
š ACT 1: The Rituals.
š¼ The Competing Lighthouses.
The two terraced houses sat on a steep hill like competing lighthouses.
Same town, different estate, both visible from the lay-by where my dad would park the van. Every December we took the long way home just to check: are they up yet?
If the answer was yes, heād kill the engine. Weād sit and stare. Gardens blazing. Windows winking. A private Hallelujah Chorus playing in my head. Handel, not subtle. Think National Lampoonās Christmas Vacation, except no chaos cutaway, or extension-cord slapstick.
Just me and my dad in the quiet. Picking out what was new this year. With our actual eyes. No phones. No filter. No commentary.
Just real light. Real excitement. Real unedited joy.
That tradition cracked in 2007. Years later I went back for a look. The lights were smaller, but still there. Two stubborn beacons competing for your gaze.
Bittersweet, that. Sweet, because persistence. Bitter, because my dad wasnāt there. I also heard why theyād pulled back: apparently, a handful of performative eco-purity types decided the problem, the big problem, was a couple of houses on a council estate making kids smile.
Iām from a working class town. The sort of place that doesnāt have much shiny. We didnāt have Oxford Street, Bond Street or Covent Garden outside our doors, blazing every night like the national grid was a personal mood lamp.
Nope, the villains here are two houses stringing fairy lights with santa and reindeer in the front garden.
Itās laughable, of all the places, some fuckers fingers wagged at two households who turned December into a small public wonder. Easy targets though init. Quick dopamine fixes for the losers. Circle-jerk self-congratulations masquerading as moral action. File that under joy-policing. Weāll get to them fuckers.
Thatās how ritual dies. Not by neglect. By do-gooders spreading toxic positivity, rebranded as virtue.
Memory isnāt nostalgia. Itās a middle finger raised at those who forgot joy had a price.
š The Christmas Tree Setup was an Event.
Holiday music went on first. My dad had three proper sets. One was in a box of three with a winter house scene on the front. Another came in a red case. The third, which was my favourite, came in a cream box with gold foil and thick borders, each case covered in some snowy winter scene. These were the real Christmas carols. The happy ones. The ones that made the room feel full.
There were always nibbles. Finger sandwiches, cocktail sausages, vol-au-vents of course, the full party spread just for decorating the tree. No extra guests. No party. Just the usuals, us, the tree, and my nan and grandpa, grampy.
There wasnāt a schedule for when the tree went up. It might be November, might be halfway through December. It didnāt matter. As and when. It also stayed up until it felt right to take it down, sometimes January, sometime February. The point wasnāt the date. The point was doing it together.
Me and my dad always did the tree. That was the deal. My mother had no interest, unless it was to moan about the plastic foliage or complain about the glitter. She hated the mess. But that was part of it. The mess meant it was Christmas.
Choosing the topper was its own ritual. Some years it was the star. Some years it was Father Christmas. Sometimes it was an angel. Sometimes we couldnāt decide, so the tree would sit for days without one while we waited to figure out what felt right. The topper was a mood, not a rule. Sometimes that rule meant buying a new one.
Philosophers from Durkheim to Eliade have pointed out that rituals arenāt just aesthetic ā theyāre containers for meaning. They stabilise the self across time. Ritual, especially when shared, becomes resistance to the entropy of memory and the commodification of joy. And none of that minimalist, curated colour palette crap either. No aesthetic. No theme will save true shared memory.
This tree was ours. A daddy-daughter tree. It was about joy, not cohesion. It was supposed to be loud. Supposed to be over the top. Supposed to be colourful, clashing and chaotic and full of shit we loved. That was the whole point, joy should have no strict doās and donāts.
We used hanging plastic foil garland swirls, the kind that hung from the ceiling like glittery helter-skelters. My mother hated them. Sheād whine about her ceilings like we were punching holes in it for shits and giggles. Looking back I kinda wish we did. We had tinsel everywhere. Wrapped around the tree, strung across the mirrors, taped to the door frames, kitchen cupboards. We even wrapped the dogs in tinsel a few times. Martha Stewart eat your heart out.
We had baubles in every colour and size hanging from every branch. If there was a bare spot, it didnāt stay bare for long. And lights? We drown every tree, every year in twinkling lights. Think electricity bursting across the room, so bright we should have had warning signs, at the very least headaches and fucked vision, at worst a photosensitive seizure.
One year, my nan got a white fibre optic tree and me and my dad geeked the fuck out setting it up for her. She still got the usual tree lights, lights on top of lights, makes perfect sense. That was my second tree ritual. Every year, without fail, two trees. One at hers, one at ours.
But the part I loved most was the ornament hunt. The ritual inside the ritual. Every Christmas we would go looking for a new decoration. It didnāt matter if we had to travel out of town to some pop-up shop or Christmas market in the valleys. We would get one. No question. It was a side quest.
I still have some of those decorations. I managed to save a few. Some of them date back to when my dad was a kid, decorating a tree with his brothers and sisters, when they could afford one. They didnāt have one every year apparently. I donāt have many ornaments left. Most of them live in memory now. The rest were binned by my mother. She didnāt want them, so no one could have.
But the tree always ended the same way. Ceiling light off. Everything dim and dark. Just the glow of the tree filling the space like it was alive.
That was the ritual.
If joy is a crime, hang the sodding evidence.
One of my favourite ornaments survived a tantrum. A white porcelain unicorn bauble, unpacked from its tissue and bubble wrap eleven month tomb on the kitchen counter out of reach of the dogs. Canāt remember how she started, but I remember my mother picking it up and letting it drop to the floor, hitting the tiles ā so casual, looking straight at me like she was flicking ash. It wasnāt about the bauble. It was about me doing the tree with him.
āDaddyās spoilt little girlā, She liked to say.
Something she neither wanted to join nor leave unspoiled. Sheād sneer, call me names, seethe at the mess, then still refuse to hang a single thing. My nan once told her flat out: youāre a spiteful cunt and not fit to be a mother. Hard to disagree.
My dad came in, gathered the shards, promised itād be right as rain with a bit of glue. He was half-right. For a while. It split apart over the years, the glue eroded, seams splitting where the rage had first split them. Later I glued it myself and pressed gold leaf into the breaks. Seams held. GS cement outlived the spite.
Now it hangs every year. Scarred, patched, not aesthetic. Just our little unicorn.
š Nine-to-Ten Window.
Every Christmas Eve, early enough to get a few hours of play, my dad would let me open one present. Any present I wanted.
But most of the time, heād nudge me toward a few he thought Iād like best. He knew what was inside, obviously. And he knew me. Knew what would hook me instantly, what Iād want to build, explore, get stuck into for the rest of the night.
Some of my favourites still live in my head like theyāre right in front of me.
The KāNEX ferris wheel with a motor.
The Meccano tractor set with its tiny bolts and over complicated instructions.
A bright red Lego T-Rex, nearly the height of a Barbie.
A huge 3D Taj Mahal puzzle I refused to take apart after building it. I glued and sellotaped the inside of that mother.
And an Airfix Spitfire I eventually hung from the ceiling with clear wire, joining the rest of my miniature fleet of planes and ships.
It was a simple ritual. Nothing flashy. Just one gift, one night early.
But it mattered.
It wasnāt about being spoiled or getting more. It was about time. About that window of Christmas Eve stillness. When everything felt quieter, softer, full of potential ā and getting to dive headfirst into something I genuinely wanted, before the noise of the next day took over.
I think a lot of people had some version of this tradition. I know some people who did, but not everyone had a dad who saved the best stuff for Christmas Eve on purpose, just so youād have extra time to enjoy it, most people I know got things like PJs that they couldnāt even wear that night because they needed the factory stank washed off them first.