Rob Blackhurst

It was in the first week of November that London had its first harbinger of Christmas. In the dead of night – a full month before the beginning of advent - Starbucks decked their stores in festive red, began serving their festive Ginger-Bread lattes in Santa-red cups, and assailed coffee drinkers with Sting's latest album of festive folk music.

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They are only the worst offender in a country where Christmas is now routinely celebrated from just after Halloween until mid-January. By Christmas Eve, the tidal wave of tinsel and Wonderful Christmastime bludgeon even the sunniest soul into submission.

Perhaps we Brits wouldn't get such chronic Christmas indigestion if we also imported the American model of Christmas: a relaxing day followed by a return to the alarm clock and the commuter run on the 26th . But when British office workers activate their vacation auto-replies, the majority won't be seen in the office for at least another ten days. The Tube starts to empty from the middle of December. Every tradesman, businessman and commissioning editor responds to request with a rueful headshake and a shrug that "you won't get anything now until the new year".

Ever since Prime Minister Edward Heath introduced a holiday on New Year's Day in the early seventies (the idea was that half the country would be bunking of work anyway nursing hangovers so it may as well be made official) most offices have concluded it is not worth opening for the hinterland between Christmas and New Year. Britain descends into a six-day centrally heated fug of leftover turkey, TV and fractious family games of Monopoly. The days drift by indistinctly. Even the industrious busy themselves with pointless activities like starting a diary that they won't keep, clearing out cupboard drawers, and browsing in hardware superstores.

It wouldn't be so bad if the twelve days of Christmas were filled with Latin-style communal merry-making and fun. I once spent a Christmas in the Northern Italian city of Trieste where the tradition is to spend Christmas day promenading around the old town with friends and eating marble cake in bustling cafes. In New York, the movie theatres are full on Christmas afternoon. But for two weeks Britain feels like it is in the middle of some apocalypse movie: newspapers and magazines miss editions, the roads empty, friends disappear into a world of family commitments. And even the TV schedules are pockmarked by the same comedy repeats of Fawlty Towers looped year after year. It's no wonder that the Samaritans report record numbers of calls and early January sees the annual peak in couples filing for divorce.

Though it seems like its being going on forever, this British festival of idleness has only emerged over the last twenty years. Most offices would work right up until Christmas Eve afternoon with generous bosses allowing their hard-pressed staff to finish an hour early. Christmas exerted its magical power precisely because it was so fleeting – a suspension of the drudgery of work for forty-eight stolen hours of joyful feasting. Even this would have seemed slothful to seventeenth century Britons. The Christmases recorded by Samuel Pepys involve attending the morning service, eating plum porridge and a roasted pullet, before returning to his office to catch up on a full afternoon's work.

It is interesting that Britain, one of the most secular countries in Europe, has become so devoted to the religion of Christmas. Perhaps it is because we lack other cheery national celebrations like Thanksgiving. Perhaps we are still traumatized by those sadistic mill-owners in Victorian England who wouldn't allow their workers to leave their cotton machines for a few hours to spend with their families. Or perhaps we have reverted to our pre-industrial, peasant selves and remembered a time of when in the depths of winter when, with little to do on the frozen land, we sat by the fire drinking home-brew.

Whatever the origins of our sloth, the economists, who Scrooge-like, add up the costs of the British festivities are right to worry. Whereas in the 1970s British worked significantly longer hours than Americans the situation is now reversed. And all these wasted Christmas days aren't helping our relative economic decline. British workers take an average twenty-five days off a year compared to an average of just ten days holiday in the US. Many Economists think this holiday habit is a large part of the reason why British GDP per capita stands at $35,500 compared to $46, 300 Stateside. But money isn't the only concern. More important is to regain some of that Christmas Eve fairy-dust and lose that dull Groundhog Day sensation that spreads across December. There is a cheap, simple solution, but it will take some discipline: a Christmas that comes but once every two years.

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