Be with your nearest and dearest at Christmas

This year, for a middle to upmarket demographic group aged roughly 16-35, Christmas will be a nightmare of travelling from one home to another. For this is the group suffering most time-starvation from the output of permissive social engineering.

Don’t get me wrong: they will suffer most in terms of having their Christmas buggered up by motorway traffic. They will not, of course, suffer from the deprivation that is the lot of those ‘protected’ by various socialist policies after 1997. Dysfunctional people like those will have other problems of a more pressing nature – for example, whether they’ll get to bed without a belt around the earhole, a simpering social worker insisting on helping with the midwinter Solstice, or with something beyond a bit of half-defrosted pizza to eat. Other older people will hope to get through Christmas without killing their partners, whose Alzheimers they can no longer tolerate. (Today a bloke of 79 appeared in Court because of this. He had been charged with murder, but nobody seems to have wondered too much why, at his age, he was the sole carer for a cabbage.)

You see, now you’ve got me started. But let’s get back to the point: the social cost of daft ideas.

I have a female chum of some ten years standing. She’s been married so many times during that period, I no longer try to keep track of her surname. She’s had two kids with one bloke, one with another, and then inherited two more from a third splice. The process of all of them getting together over Christmas involves a full frontal attack on the ecosphere, with planes, trains, automobiles and ferries belching out every known form of pollution so that this post-nuclear family can be in the bosom of ….er, somebody or other.

There are now so many steps, halves, formers, exes and separateds, the fallout from Sixties hippyism must be driving most of Britain’s road-building policy. “We have to have an East Midlands bypass,” says the MP for South West Walsall (North Division), “otherwise how will all those Wolverhampton single mums meet up with their one-time significant others without getting stuck in Willenhall among the hordes of civilised divorced?” Well, quite.

I used to think it was bad enough when, as a young married Dad, I had to drive between London, St Annes in Lancashire and Weston-super-Mare in Somerset over three days. Grandfolks, after all, had to see babies unwrap presents and then play with the wrapping while ignoring the presents. That sort of thing. The period from December 27th to January 3rd was spent entirely asleep, tossing the kids an occasional wishbone while dosing them with Calpol. Otherwise, the return to work would’ve been unbearable. So just imagine what it’s like now.

The negotiations about Christmas location begin these days some time in July. Between the skiing holiday in Cauteret and that rented house north of Perth, parents and kids the length and breadth of Europe have to make a decision: will we take a train west to granny in Liverpool, or take a plane to Bergerac? No pressure, mind.

My own two-times family represents a perhaps extreme example. For Christmas, the collection of rellies will be variously in Australia, Canada, France, Surrey, Shropshire, South Africa, North Wales, Blackpool, California and New York. But this solves more problems than those unfortunate families plagued by places easily reached on the motorway. “Well obviously,” one can say, “We can’t catch the No 73 down to Durban”. Of course we can’t. We’d much rather be in the Seychelles.

I’ve never really been entirely sure why the wider definition of family feels the need to be together for Christmas. I’m sure a lot of it is selfishness: an inability to accept that the kids have flown the nest, and now have their own family. Some of it is brought upon the middle aged by the curse of relatives who live far too long. But a helluva a lot of it is guilt: “I broke up this family, but I’m determined to prove that the new bigger one is just as happy”.

Such inherent guilt has been rendered somehow OK by the profoundly silly idea that doing what feels good is always about finding oneself/expanding as a person/trying for happiness/we only get once round the track, and all the rest of the relativist bollocks. The truth is that we can’t build happy societies upon the sand of “hang loose”. Familial loyalty, certainty and love stand high above any other consideration. A community is but a collection of that. A job, a political idea, a social policy, an affair conducted on a sea of alcohol, or a Union of States are as nothing compared to the vital glue that binds selfless parents to respectful kids.

Such parents and kids shouldn’t need emotionally diluted festivals like Christmas to bind them together. Better to be in your own home – with a visit to the local on Christmas morning – than tear-arsing up and down Britain’s motorways.