How Marks & Spencer spoiled Christmas

Working in a charity shop, where the Christmas cards go out in July, means I’m more aware than most how early the festive season begins these days. The postal service can be a bit erratic but surely it won’t take five months for a greeting card to reach its final destination? Our excuse is that the money we raise goes to a good cause. Regular shops don’t have the same justification.

Marks & Spencer, in particular, is one of the worst offenders when it comes to Christmas. The retail equivalent of the BBC, M&S is sanctimonious and overpriced. It's a shop that thinks nothing of having Halloween merch celebrating ghouls jostling with the Christmas junk celebrating the Prince of Peace.

Pity the poor shop assistants, forced to listen to Christmas pop songs for the best part of two months. Even counting the ones which have fallen by the wayside (The Goodies singing Father Christmas Do Not Touch Me and the cleaned-up Radio 1 version of Fairytale Of New York: if rock and roll was invented today, it would be the youngsters burning the parents records) or fallen foul because of the sins of the person who sang it (Another Rock And Roll Christmas by Gary Glitter) that still leaves a lot of slop to fill the shopping trolley. Stop The Calvary makes me feel warlike; Mistletoe and Wine makes me feel like a festivity-banning roundhead; and Driving Home For Christmas is about as entertaining as gridlock. Even good Christmas songs can make me feel cross, such as Last Christmas reminding me that my favourite pop star, George Michael, died on Christmas Day 2016. I found Do They Know It’s Christmas? quite touching at the time but the tax arrangements of Bob Geldof and his bellowing Band Aid bandmate Bono make it a bitter listen now. And as for Wizzard vowing that they wish it could be Christmas every day, that’s actually quite ‘meta’: by the time Christmas Day arrives, it feels as though it has been Christmas every day for the past six weeks.

But the horror of Christmas songs palls into insignificance compared to Christmas television commercials, corralling us like gormless reindeer into buying things we don’t want and can barely afford. The only winners are the credit-card companies and divorce lawyers, who will be among the few people waking up perky on the first day of 2023. Once again M&S are the worst culprits, going for our weak spots with the double-pronged attack of a hefty donation to charity and the warbling of Harry Styles.

Anna Braithwaite, M&S Clothing & Home marketing director, says: ‘Christmas is a time that brings families and communities together and we know customers are determined to protect those celebrations’. This makes stuffing mince pies down one’s gullet sound oddly militant.

Styles' song is called Treat People With Kindness; one hopes that M&S will practise what it preaches and not mess about with ridiculous policies on changing rooms after the #boycottMarksandSpencer campaign this year. In May, M&S apologised after a young disabled lesbian was refused access to the toilet in the shop's Exeter branch. Like all those who hide behind #BeKind, M&S can be pretty cruel – yet despite its dire financial situation over the past few years, it appears to think it can bring the country together with its over-priced Yuletide tat. This is not just cynical Christmas grifting gimmickry: this is M&S cynical Christmas grifting gimmickry.

The issues I have with modern Christmas stems from the twin pillars of my life: altruism and hedonism. As a Christian, I really do feel that one of my special times of the year has been culturally appropriated by non-believers; as a convivialist I have a problem being ‘allowed’ to have fun. All year long I practise gifting and carousing – but during November, I feel myself becoming Scrooge in reverse. As soon as the first obscenely-priced ‘advent’ calendar ad shows up, I find myself identifying as a Bolshevik; by the time my own Platinum Amex seasonal brochure arrives (Christmas Wreath Workshop at Home House, £95 per person; Regent Street Gourmet Odyssey and Festive Shopping, £125 per person) I’d happily put myself up against a wall and shoot myself. And when the 5/6/7-bird roast rocks up like something out of an HP Lovecraft fever dream, even Armageddon has its charms.

Thank goodness that I have my beloved Stoics to turn to at this trying time of year; especially pertinent is their advice that, when we find ourselves in a situation unpleasing to us, we must change it, remove ourselves from it or endure it without complaint. And I’ll listen to my favourite Christmas record ever – certainly one you won’t hear playing in supermarkets: Cristina Monet’s Things Fall Apart: ‘My mother said, I'm a survivor/I pull together Christmas every year/And then one year to reach up high/To hang an angel from the tree/Became a painful thing/Besides, she's lost her wing, my mother said/Things fall apart but they never leave my heart/It’s Christmas…’. I’ll feel momentarily sad that Cristina died two years ago with Covid. Then I’ll think that that’s the thing we really all celebrate at Christmas: that we made it through another year. So let the revels begin!