Kelly Given: I miss when Christmas was a less commercial affair

Whether we feel pressured to keep up with those around us, we feel obligated to overspend on our loved ones in an almost wordless thank you or the never-ending marketing campaigns that are forcibly shoved down our throats finally get the better of us, each year manages to financially out-do the last, every single year.

It doesn’t help that we now also live permanently through the lens of our social media profiles – and Christmas is far from an exception to this rule.

Arguably, it gets worse around the holiday season. TikTok is saturated with gift ideas, parents divulging the spoils of their Christmas shopping – and with the shop feature now a permanent fixture of the app, we can barely escape the Christmas discourse even when we’re simply looking for a light-hearted animal video at the end of a busy day.

This week on my “For You” page – where an algorithm suggests content it thinks I will be interested in – a nine-year-old girl had asked for a Van Cleef and Arpels bracelet with a price tag of more than £3000 and expensive skincare.

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At nine years old, my Christmas list consisted almost exclusively of the arts and crafts page of an Argos catalogue, and call me old-fashioned, but I think that’s how it should still be. Christmas used to feel much simpler – a notion I fear gets a little further away from us with every year that passes.

A nine-year-old should not be worrying about skincare – and if I dare to go down this path, it will lead me to an entirely different discussion on the perils of patriarchy and why we need to shield young girls from its effects for as long as humanly possible. So I will refrain. But I stand firm in that a nine-year-old should not know the first thing about skincare – and no parent of a nine-year-old should be considering indulging that premise either.

We have officially arrived at an absolute farce.

There are a multitude of pressures at play at this time of year and it often feels like it wasn’t that long since we last went through the rigmarole of selecting the perfect gift for every member of our close friends and family.

It rolls around like clockwork each year, and yet each year we complain that it doesn’t feel like enough time has passed since the last.

Should Christmas feel so draining that we constantly fear the next one? We have taken a holiday that was supposed to be rooted in joy, appreciation and quality time with loved ones and turned it into a capitalist hellscape that induces more dread than it does anything else.

The pressures of Christmas shopping don't add to the festive spirit

There’s a common practice called “giftflation” in which we out-do our gift-giving from the previous year – in a sort of sinister, self-manufactured competition with ourselves – as if there isn’t already enough to worry about. This Christmas, Brits are expected to spend an average of £602 each on Christmas gifts – a whopping 40% increase on the 2022 average of £429. All of which is contributing to a £27.6 billion overall spend, an increase of 37% on 2022’s £20.1bn.

What’s more concerning is the average credit card spend this Christmas is expected to be £627 per cardholder, which amounts to almost a quarter of the average UK monthly salary. An unsurprising fact given that the UK is currently neck-deep in a Tory-manufactured cost of living crisis that will once again see energy bills rise in the new year.

The cost of living has this year become unsustainable for families across these islands – with record levels of poverty being reported as a direct result of failed fiscal policy that has seen energy companies increase their profits by 900% at the expense of hard-working people.

Forward-planning is often the only way for the average person to keep up with the cost of Christmas at the same time as avoiding debt, but the hike in bills this year has made it almost impossible for working families to plan ahead. There is simply a shortage of spare cash, and that pinch is about to be felt even tighter this holiday season.

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Ahead of the big day, money-saving expert Martin Lewis recently published a guide to debt and mental health – one that will prove useful for those going into Christmas with no choice but to borrow. It found that 48% of people who have or have had mental health problems have severe or crisis debt, and explored the intrinsic link between the two topics.

As pressures mount, the monetary value of Christmas lists grow exponentially and we each dive into competition with our previous selves, it seems we are hurtling towards a more debt-ridden Christmas than ever before, and the effects on our mental health will be keenly felt.

Perhaps it’s time for us to collectively reject the over-commercialised version of Christmas and return to a more traditional definition of the celebration. The reality is that most Christmas gifts are forgotten about, regardless of the money spent on them. And our loved ones would thank us more for not entering into crippling debt in their honour.

So log off TikTok, forget what you bought last year and focus on celebrating the season with your nearest and dearest. Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year – if we intentionally practice what it is actually supposed to be about.