Enough of Me-mas
Someone sent me a personalized Christmas ornament last week. It’s a clear glass bauble with an image of my spoon-faced self inside, along with the words on the box: “Your little ones will love decorating the tree even more — well, until they start arguing about whose bauble should be higher than whose!”
It might be the single most revolting thing I’ve seen. There’s some fierce competition out there, too.
With the 3D facial-featured Elf on the Shelf “made in your likeness,” the heart-shaped “Mr. & Mrs.” ornaments, personalized advent calendars and customizable trees, it’s beginning to look a lot like Me-mas everywhere you go.
How it’s taken us this long to turn the birth of an increasingly irrelevant and, frankly, triggeringly non-gender-fluid figure from the early ADS into yet another celebration of our own endless wonder, I can’t fathom.
After all, Christmas has all the ingredients needed to bolster the Cult of Me.
It can and has been extended indefinitely — not just beyond the day and month, but now the season, too. And with an increasing number of us experiencing pre-emptive seasonal depression at the thought of pleasure and indulgence being finite things restricted to a single day or week, this is presumably why the shops were already festooned with tinsel by mid-november, by which time Mariah Carey had already worked herself up into a hysterical warble over what she didn’t want, need or care about.
Still, wasn’t November a little early to be getting the trees out? If my social media account was anything to go by, I was the only person not to have put up our tree sometime in mid- to late November. But according to home interior gurus such as Aileen Shah, who was interviewed about this disturbing new trend recently, anyone leaving it for a few weeks may be too late.
You see, the real reason Christmas has been co-opted by the “Me, Me, Me-ers” is Instagram.
Fuelled by a furious one-upmanship, ordinary people chasing likes are styling their trees and homes like those of their favourite celebrities, who have, in turn, been showcasing their domestic winter wonderlands since what feels like early autumn in order to maximize Insta-mileage.
This and a recently released report on how Christmas decorations have changed in the last decade are the only ways to explain the rise of “blush pink fake firs” and nativity sets featuring anything but the actual nativity scene.
Any celebration based around food, as we know, is also always great. And because a proper Memas involves standing out from the hordes, more than half of millennials are reportedly planning on buying “more colourful foods” this Christmas in order to make their dinner — and therefore themselves — look more appealing on social media.
But nothing says Me-mas quite like Quality Street’s new customizable festive tin, which promises a lifetime free of sharing, adversity and orange creams — and a Christmas filled with magic moments, every one of which is about you.
Pity the poor fool who still thought Christmas was the season to think about anyone else.