When I was younger I had an unashamed love for Christmas. I was one of those children that couldn’t sleep on Christmas eve- this lasted for a fair few years and ensured that by night-time on Christmas day I was completely exhausted from the onslaught of consumption and family interaction I’d been experiencing for the last 24 hours. However, in a trajectory I’ve heard from a lot of my friends, as I’ve got older, I’ve just got more and more disenchanted with the holiday season. I do still enjoy the addition of sparkle to normally dreary shops and Christmas food, but there are a few niggling problems that have come to light for me recently, especially in the way the media deals with the whole thing- primarily the visual media that I consume unhealthy amounts of.
The way that Christmas is portrayed through adverts follows certain tropes. It is great for children and it’s a time for families to get together, and it’s also a time to show your partner how much you value them by showering them with presents. This is all lovely, but you would honestly think from watching advert breaks that there was no other type of family than one involving children, and that the possibility of a gay couple would be completely unthinkable. Just to name a guilty parties: Matalan, Littlewoods, John Lewis, ASDA, the list is pretty much endless. No children? Not in a straight couple? Christmas is apparently not for you. Is it therefore not fair to say that there is a serious problem here in a lack of non-hetero-normative and child-centric representation in the media around Christmas time?
It isn’t just adverts, but the film industry also has been sucked into this traditionalism as well. Most Christmas films are squarely aimed at children and centre on family life, or the upholding of a status quo. No disruption of any standardised categories is allowed at Christmas, normality must prevail. Those who are going to try and derail tradition are demonised- see The Grinch and Home Alone as examples. Things always have to keep a traditional family Christmas intact. Even in Tim Burton’s (who might be seen as a generally alternative-ish film maker in the context of Hollywood) Nightmare before Christmas, the possibility of a hybrid Christmas/Halloween created by Jack Skellington instead of Santa, one away from tradition, is shot down and yet again, normality prevails and children can have the normal Christmas they apparently want.
I honestly have got to the point where I dread the advert breaks in my (admittedly obscene amount of) television watching and do not actively seek out Christmas films, just because what I see is not the experience of huge swathes of the population who are not part of traditional families, or kids, or even in straight relationships. I feel completely misled by the majority of the mainstream Christmas visual media. It is as if those outside of these groups are being excluded and constantly told that their representation is not important at this time of year: Christmas is not for you. Sorry.
When trying to work out why this is, I came to a predictable conclusion that the Nativity Story obviously centres around a birth and a family, thereby establishing arguably the ultimate motherly archetype. Nothing could be more crucial to Christmas than Jesus’ birth; it’s the excuse it has to even exist. But, is it possible to put a queer spin on the Christmas story itself? Hear me out. A queer family can be anything against the hetero-normative mother/father/child relationship. Jesus is not a product of a normal family- getting impregnated by the Holy Spirit is definitely not within the standard boundaries of heterosexual reproductive sex! Jesus is essentially born into a superficially traditional family with a fairly queer back-story. However, it still remains that no matter how bizarre the roots of the Christmas story are (and as much religious literature is), it is still generally converted into the perfect nativity scene and the typical two parent one child image. It’s a stretch to see it as queer when removed from the story of Mary’s impregnation. The imagery remains removed from its mythological origins in order to maintain the appearance of normality.
Are there other areas of culture, then, that might be more conducive to a queerer conception of Christmas? If we turn to music, there might be a little bit of hope there. Apparently one of the nation’s favourite Christmas songs, Fairytale of New York by the Pogues and Kirsty Macoll, is melodically uplifting but with a profoundly different attitude to Christmas than the films and adverts described above. The contrast between the verses expresses arguably the failure of a relationship, shattering the illusion of the family-centric time for loved ones to come together in heterosexual pairings that the films and current adverts spend so much time constructing. Although it would be, once again, a push to be able to queer a reading of this, it certainly does cover the failure of heterosexuality, de-naturalising it and not seeing a happy coupled ending as possible.
My personal favourite thing to listen to around Christmas is Phil Spector’s Christmas album, which features Darlene Love’s Christmas (Baby Please Come Home). Much like Fairytale of New York, this is another story of a failed relationship as Love pleads with her partner to return to her for the holidays. The partner’s gender isn’t mentioned, so you don’t have to assume any straight meaning, so it could be read as queer in this way if you choose to. However if a heterosexual context is used, then once again the somewhat mournful emotions expressed cast a pretty depressing light on the possibility of being in a happy, straight relationship at Christmas time. Once again, Christmas is given a different spin through music and heterosexual coupling is not automatically vindicated by the holidays. Another song on the record, I Saw Mommy kissing Santa Claus, I find somewhat queasy to listen to because of the sound of grown women (The Ronettes) taking on the viewpoint of a child, but other than this, it is also unsettling for family structures. From the child’s viewpoint given in the song, the mother is basically being unfaithful. Dramatic irony of the listener aside, who knows that Santa and the father are one and the same, this could again be seen as de-stabilising a traditional family, at least for the child, and somewhat taboo-breaking. How interesting a sequel to this song would be, where a child has their innocence taken away and the parents have to explain either a bizarre infidelity that crosses between a mythological figure and the child’s role model of a mother, or in fact that Santa and father are the same person. In any case, this song leads to a pretty non-traditional conclusion.
Perhaps the non-traditional undertones of this song were why RuPaul, arguably the world’s most famous drag queen, chose to cover it for his Christmas album entitled Ho Ho Ho, released in 1997 (double entendre most definitely intended there). The version RuPaul has done has an openly queer twist, as it’s been skewed to ‘I saw Daddy Kissing Santa Claus’. Gender bending and Christmas all come together in one glittery package and finally a queer Christmas has been achieved. It is a slight shame that the music itself isn’t quite timeless as it seems stuck in a 90s disco sound, its artificiality taking away from the subversive enjoyment of this genuine artefact of a queer Christmas in the media.
So, if visual media is somewhat hopeless, and music offers something of a respite in non-hetero-normative depictions of Christmas away from children and helps to de-naturalise families and heterosexual couples, is there any other hope for a Christmas with an overtly queer centre? Surprisingly, there is a hugely queer element in long-established Christmas culture that I can’t believe I almost forgot. Pantomime. Like a lot of others that have grown up in England, I’ve been going to Pantomimes for as long as I can remember. You cannot argue against the campness inherent in that ultimate figure of the pantomime dame, who can only ever be played against the actor’s gender. A dame is not a dame if she isn’t completely over-the-top and satirising tropes of femininity, all whilst wearing insane costumes and often becoming almost a parody of domesticity. They are also the ones that are allowed to deliver the most subversive jokes. There is the leading male figure often being played by young women, which has become practically the norm for performances of Peter Pan and Dick Whittington. Many more traditional parents who may be somewhat wary of, for example, a Christmas album by a drag queen, would have no problem taking them to see essentially a live drag performance with multiple crossings of gender and sometimes somewhat adult humour from the dames.
So, this Christmas I will be trying to ignore the normalised gender and family relations that are being pushed down my throat by TV and certain films. I will have to continue to ignore the fact that Christmas is not packaged by the visual media as being for those who are outside of traditional family structures. Instead I will be going to see Dame Edna in Panto, taking respite in her camp humour, and I am very much looking forward to it.
Image: Raphael Perez – Flickr
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