A Victorian Christmas? We Need a Change.

The present form of Christmas, which includes family gatherings and trees and presents, was invented and puffed into being in England in the early Nineteenth century, Queen Victoria's reign, by the wealthy middle classes.

Until then Easter had been the holiest time of the year; which made sense as it was possible to travel at Easter without freezing to death, and since there was nothing to do in the fields for a while, pilgrimages were in order for some.

The present insistence on gathering family and giving gifts and so on simply didn't exist before about 1750. Scrooge's was simply one attitude to Christmas, one going out of fashion, in the mid 1800s. Remember, though, that Dickens venerated family at a time when people had large families, very large, sometimes, and included half the neighbors as "family". It was a lot different from our present day, tense and tortured nuclear family structure (and face it, many families are these days).

Could it be time, now, to redesign Christmas so it fits what we need, rather than what we're told we need? How would you do it?

I'd like to see less of the frantic commercial behavior I witness, which cannot actually make people happy, surely? I'd like to see us giving things like food and drink as gifts (so the landfills won't overflow and things will be enjoyed in the moment), And I'd like to see some of our gifts go to the less privileged, too, as a matter of custom. But perhaps I'm just a Scrooge?

I'd like to see people give more love and less glitzy trash.