If Your Christmas Is Classy, Then It’s Just Not Wonderful Enough by Tom Beasley

After a year as packed with personal and professional upheaval as this one, Christmas is absolutely the ultimate balm. And so this year, it got me thinking about what Christmas means to different people. A few weeks ago, one of my friends sent me a TikTok clip in which the video creator said they were “so glad” they grew up with the gaudy, colourful Christmases of the 1990s and 2000s, rather than the minimalist colours and influencer aesthetic of today's festive seasons.

Obviously, this is a wildly simplistic perspective. There have always been people who think Christmas decorations should be stylish and subtle rather than looking like someone tripped and fell into a branch of Wilko. But I have absolutely no time for these people. Sorry if you're reading this surrounded by muted décor and next to a tree with only a single colour of baubles and tinsel, but I don't think you're doing Christmas right. Your house might look lovely but have a bit more fun.

Christmas should be tacky. Christmas should be camp. Christmas should be, most importantly, a bit naff and silly. That's the whole point. There's a reason we don't tend to watch Christmas movies or listen to Christmas music outside of the month of December. Without the festive spirit of the most wonderful time of the year, everything just seems a bit rubbish.

Tackiness is the order of the day when it comes to my Christmas. Our tree always looks like it has been dragged through a Bavarian market in a snowstorm, covered as it is with ornaments of varying levels of classiness. There are glittery baubles and tinsel, of course, but also a T-Rex wearing a tutu and a shark butler in a tuxedo. Obviously, I also have to let my nerd flag fly, so we have a Pizza Planet truck from Pixar, a Paddington Bear, several Star Wars decorations, and an Infinity Gauntlet from the Marvel movies.

This feels to me like the way Christmas should be. It's wrong to get caught up on making your house look stylish and elegant. That's what the other 11 months of the year are for.  At Christmas, you eat too much food, you drink a little more than you should, and you crash out as soon as the credits roll on the new Gavin and Stacey special. That's the natural order of things.

What I'm saying, I guess, is that Christmas is the perfect time to relax and just allow yourself to be as weird and uninhibited as possible. If you like the dinosaur in ballet gear, buy the dinosaur in ballet gear and give them pride of place on your tree as your dozens of fairy lights flash frantically like a distress call on a spaceship. Christmas is about the embrace of gaudy, garish maximalism and the glorious sense of camp that comes along with it.

Of course, I'm being a little hyperbolic. You should celebrate Christmas in whatever way you want and embrace whatever traditions make you happiest. But, for me, the reason Christmas is so wonderful is that it provides you with the opportunity to give up any attempt at classy restraint, embrace all of your guilty pleasures, and be thankful for what you have in this life – family, friends, and enough tinsel to bring down King Kong. And what I have is a plastic shark in a tuxedo, so I'm a very happy man.

© 2024 Tom Beasley

Tom Beasley is a freelance film journalist, Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic and podcaster
now living in Coventry. He can be reached at tomjbeasley@gmail.com.