The joy of Christmas

It's 3 January 2008 and the Christmas-New Year holiday is over.

For me, this holiday season always evokes mixed feelings. Climatically, it's a dark, cold and depressing time of year. But more than this, ever since my university days I have associated it mentally with boredom and loneliness: it was a time when my wind-swepped English campus was virtually closed down and vacated, except for a few dozen overseas students, too bored to study and too skint to do anything else.

Those days have long since gone. I have now been married and in full-time employment for many years and, come Christmas time, I go home to hibernate until after the New Year.

But the mixed feelings continue. For one thing, I cannot help but draw comparisons between the Christmas-New Year festivities and our own two main festivals, Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha, and the contrast cannot be starker.

For the British, the Christmas-New Year holiday is a time of excess and self-indulgence, with many spending hundreds – some thousands – of mostly borrowed pounds on ever more expensive gifts, alcohol and food. It is also a time of adultery at alcohol-fuelled office parties, marital breakdown and domestic violence. For many – elderly people, single parents, youngsters from broken homes – it's a time of loneliness and depression. And outside, in the streets on Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year's Day, it's as if a curfew had been imposed.

I am neither a prude nor an angel, and in Christmases past I have had more than my fair share of over-indulgence in alcohol and women, together and separately. However, neither then nor now could I see the joy and the elegance at Christmas time that I associate with our two Eids. To be sure, there's lots of joy among British children expecting gifts. But what I miss most is the very special atmosphere of the Eids: the friendliness and general feelings and expressions of goodwill, the people dressed up in new clothes to visit friends and family and, the happy, bustling streets. For us, the Eids are joyous, family and communal festivals, not a frenzy of greed, self-indulgence and drunkiness.

Sadly, the British people, who are naturally insular and asocial, become social animals only after consuming vast quantities of alcohol, often with terrible consequences. And after the hangover, they turn back into their asocial selves, finding it excruciatingly hard to say hello, or good morning or even to nod in acknowlegement of their neighbour, friend or colleague.

Be that as it may, I am beginning to quite like the Christmas-New Year period, but not for the gifts, the food, the drink or the office parties. For me, it's simply a time to get away from the debillitating routine of work, and from the ever growing number of mediocrities who inhabit the upper echelons of the public (and increasingly the private) sector in Britain.