Christmas, likeanyotherspecial occasion, has been affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, social media and the cost-of-living crisis. These and other pressures have changed the way we celebrate whatever it is we personally celebrate on December 25. But, whether an enthusiastic shopper or anti-consumer activist, a Christian or a devout non-believer, a loner or fanatically family-focused, you almost certainly still acknowledge the holiday – a word, it is worth remembering, that comes from the Old English “haligaeg”, meaning holy day. Fortunately, the festival is flexible enough to accommodate every persuasion and move with the times, no matter how turbulent they may be.
DREAMING OF A RITE CHRISTMAS
One of the reasons nearly everyone does Christmas, as Brigitte Bönisch-Brednich, professor in the School of Social and Cultural Studies at Victoria University of Wellington Te Herenga Waka, explains, is that we need rituals to structure our lives, and Christmas is a super-ritual.
She says, “It has nearly all the elements we need in a fully developed ritual: gift giving, relationships and the reassuring of these relationships, of belonging to a family, to a nation, to an ethnicity and to a faith.”
Which explains why, for instance, families whose members have almost no
