Christmas: A Hands On Demo And Review

Maybe the only way to truly understand Christmas is to treat it like we treat everything in our lives, a product to be used, reviewed, and possibly recycled if found wanting.

Recently I came into possession of Christmas, an annual subscription service which proclaims to be fun for ages zero and up. The instructions didn’t mention however that the fun temporarily dies in the late teen years. It does however get revived in the late twenties when the family starts to begin to be repopulated by human pupa. Personally, I find a service that’s only rendered enjoyable by seeing how hyped tiny people are about the whole thing a flawed service model. Then again Disney+ seems to be going gangbusters so what do I know?

The Christmas marketing campaigns have gotten out of hand due to interested third parties such as The Warehouse getting involved. It has a large footprint which continues to expand as the years go on. Scientists expect that based on current models, by the year 2050 malls will be blasting Jingle Bell Rock in early February.

Functionality-wise, Christmas is actuated by the act of gift giving, despite the insistence by literally everybody that it isn’t necessary. One person in the group is a down and out liar. They’re an adult, but they still covet gifts like Gollum. To provide this person catharsis several years of gift giving systems are trialled that don’t leave the entire family unit destitute buying everybody gifts. Unfortunately, standard models for gift giving do not scale well.

Also gift giving forces us to realise that we may know nothing about the interests of our loved ones, or perhaps that our loved ones have no discernable interests AT ALL. They exist only to consume, much like an H.P. Lovecraft eldritch horror.

Issues of scale also occur once you belong to multiple families who all have a subscription to Christmas, and they’re desperate to get as much use out of it as possible. Personally, I recommend that the least popular family ceades its subscription to more dominant groups. Unfortunately, the marketers behind Christmas saw this strategy coming a mile off. They have consequently made sure that applying Darwinian strategies to families at Christmas time would be considered a major faux pas.

The accompanying soundtrack to Christmas also leaves a lot to be desired. As with many of the Christmas traditions, it doesn’t seem to have been regionalised in any way at all. I’m forced to think whimsically about snow drifts while I get sunburned feet. Also, the official mascot is an overweight Coke-themed Ronald McDonald figure, who almost universally appears in wooly clothing.
A full Christmas+ subscription requires you to attribute your gifts to this mascot. I don’t know this guy, I don’t owe him anything, let alone my children’s affection. I do not recommend a full subscription.

Other traditions surrounding Christmas, such as Jesus’s birthday just so happening to land right in the middle of the Pagan celebration of winter solstice is pretty cute. As is the huge amount of food provided on the day. This is a redeeming factor which I have no critique of, and pavlova needs at least one day a year where everybody remembers it exists as something other than something we fight with the Australians for.

If Christmas was to tweak its service model, I would suggest dropping almost everything except the food and maybe packaging some adapters so the Southern Hemisphere doesn’t feel like a weirdo for subscribing.

I give Christmas a 4/10.