IT IS not just the shops that cash in on Christmas. Judging by
the Christmas Day edition of Thinking Allowed (Radio 4),
the festive season provides plenty of opportunities for
sociological research, and journal papers loaded with that
all-important academic quality, "impact".
Professor Philip Hancock has written a piece for the Journal
of Work, Employment and Society, "Being Santa Claus" - a study
of the socio-economic activities that go into constructing our
experience of Christmas. In other words, why do grown men dress up
in Santa outfits for hours on end to be ill-treated by children and
parents?
There are many similarities between the working conditions of
the average Santa, and the sorts of employees that you would expect
a sociologist to study - assembly-line workers, call-centre
operators, and the like. They are often under time pressures: one
reported having to get through 100 children in an hour. Yet Santas
report a feeling of worthiness, even self-identification with their
avatar. "When I put on the suit," another reported, "I am a
different person."
Laurie Taylor's second guest in this programme brought
sociological discourse into the home. For who among us has not
undergone the process, described by Professor Jennifer Mason, of
invoking and revising Christmas traditions, year after year? It
happens most obviously when new couples negotiate their traditions
for the first time.
Are you used to waiting until the dishes are washed before
touching those presents, or were you tearing at the wrapping paper
at 7 a.m.? We read moral implications into this, and many other
Christmas traditions: as you see the woman to whom you have pledged
your life ripping at the Sellotape with her teeth, heedless of the
fact that you have not completed the packaging on your own present,
you cannot help wondering if this is not a revelation of some
deep-seated moral flaw; while she sees your puritannical
self-possession as a sign of control-freakery.
What rituals we establish for our children demonstrate
perfectly, Professor Mason says, the "lived experience of
tradition", combining elements of childhood memory and myth, moral
obligation, and customised quirkiness.
The other piece of radio that really got under the skin last
week was the Christmas Day episode of Belief, Radio 3's
series of interviews with Joan Bakewell, which have always been a
hit-and-miss affair. The trouble has often been that the guests are
not used to expressing matters of faith. This was not the case with
the actor and comedian Sally Phillips, however, who gave the most
insightful and moving account of a religious conscience that I have
heard for a long time.
There is something Pauline about her conversion: an obsessive
atheist, she experienced a sudden conversion in a supermarket,
thanks to the prayers of an actor friend. But she acknowledges that
being a Christian will never, and indeed should never, be cool.
But it was with her first child, born with Down syndrome, that
her most profound revelation came: a child who brings out in people
their better selves and a vision of, as Phillips beautifully
described it, "the topsy-turvy" Kingdom of heaven.