How to Hack Christmas

Creative solutions for a girl who doesn't quite get into the Christmas cheer

Christmas is a cultural script we know well, from the mall Santa's red cap and beard right down to the toasty roasted chestnuts and fuzzy stockings hanging on the mantel. Picturing it could just send shivers through my snow-boots ... except I'm in Southern California.

1. Food and Drink

For many, Christmas is a time for the tacit celebration of overabundance—and a reprieve of Thanksgiving—or the supermarket's second chance to sell off the last of its frozen turkeys and pies. Not for Tristam Stuart. Stuart has long decried food waste in the U.K. and internationally, and as the Financial Times reported today, last week this self-professed freegan fed 5,000 people in Trafalgar Square to demonstrate just how far food can stretch and still satisfy.

As it turns out, the answer is quite a lot: "people were queuing up [on December 16, at the Square] and taking away bagfuls of free groceries. And when they got to the front of the line – it’s just a joyous sight – people were saying, ‘What’s wrong with this? Why was this going to be wasted?’ I didn’t need to say any more. Exactly.”

How does Stuart's theory bear on your Christmas holiday or mine? It's fundamentally about rejecting the notion that we must consume or purchase more than we need in the spirit of the season. And if you really must have that whole, roasted turkey (like my mom did) then make sure it doesn't go to waste—I can promise you there's going to be a lot of turkey broth, turkey lasagna, and turkey enchiladas from now through New Years'. That's the price you pay.

And ethical consumption is not just about reducing food waste. It also means laying off the eggnog, or else taking yourself off the roads entirely on Christmas Eve, when drunk driving accidents and rates soar.


2. Company

The holidays are about family, love, joy, and togetherness. This is a beautiful farce that leads plenty of otherwise functional people (like yours truly) to contemplate sitting in bed with a bowl of popcorn watching a celebrity match-maker show. But not you.

As Dan Savage so brilliantly points out in his podcast this week, "I guarantee you that bars and nightclubs in the town on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day are packed with other people who ...needed to get away and are also single, like you! So put the iPod down, put the cookies down, go to a bar, have a drink, flirt, and get yourself some Christmas fucking." Thank you always, Dan, for your unflinching lucidity.

And not me, either. I am spending my Christmas weekend with other Jews, heretics, and maybe a couple of Christians who have fallen off their parents' church-going bandwagon. We're cooking and watching movies together (tonight was the Matrix, hence allusions to hacking a system built on comfortable lies)

3. Gifts
And speaking of comfortable lies, I give you gift-giving! I'm a college student, who works 15-hours a week and dreams of working in a bankcrupt industry, so obviously I enjoy what financial help I can get. But I don't think Christmas is an appropriate occasion for anyone to help me get one step closer to financial independence from my parents.

But with money tight for everyone these days, I more than appreciate NY Times columnist Nick Kristof's take on the adage, "it's the thought that counts." Yeah, why not put that cashmere scarf back on its shelf and send a little something the way of Deworm the World, or the World Wide Fistula Fund?


4. Family, hope, and all the trappings of the season

It would be wrong to leave out any mention of my family from a post on how to fix Jesus' birthday for non-believers, as though after all this talk of charities and slow-cooked tomato broths, a reader could only picture my family gathered around a fireplace, holiday-sweater-clad, arm in arm. In truth, Christmas has not been much of a family affair since before I was a teenager, and it's even less so this year.

My parents' house (my house? This I've been less sure of for more than a year now) is full of unease this year. It's usually filled with the busy hum of people whole-heartedly committed to their individual routines: my dad in the backyard watering the plants, my mom folding laundry, my brother in his room slouching over his laptop. the devotion to efficiency.

But today is different, because my 16 year-old brother spent the past year battling colon disease. He missed out on most of his sophomore year of high school and a period that is by many accounts the capstone of the teenage years, and we're still waiting to learn whether or not he has really beat it. Some bad symptoms resurfaced yesterday, sending both our parents into all their rituals of worrying.

I want to be supportive, but there are so many limitations. Chief among them is a year-long conflict between my parents and me that I only I am now beginning to overcome. It's about my identity and my ability to make decisions as an adult, 20 years old, and how at this age their so-called protection could be hurting me. It's tough stuff for a parent to stomach, I'm told, but it isn't easy for me, either, to think that even though I have achieved personal successes and dreamed dreams that make me the happiest I've been in my life, I'm a disappointment to them.

But it's Christmas, a holiday so glittery and cheery that it could make anyone without a turkey drenched in cranberry sauce on their table feel a little lonely, so here I am; making soup that maybe nobody will want to eat, renting DVDs and hoping that this house will allow itself some happiness—and feeling more than a little guilty that I get to leave for my home again in just another week.