Why I don’t celebrate Christmas

Posted by louisa on Friday 24 December 2010 in meta | 12 comments

I don’t celebrate Christmas. I don’t buy presents, give cards, eat turkey or see family. For the last few years, I’ve treated it like a normal work day, this year will be a normal Saturday. I think we’ll have pizza for tea and watch a film.

Not a special day for me

I was talking to some (teenage) kids at class about it a few weeks ago and they exclaimed “but it’s Christmas!”, as if it had some natural inherent specialness. I explained that I’m not a Christian and so I feel about Christmas how they might feel about, say, Eid or Hanukkah. It’s something that other people, with other beliefs, celebrate but I don’t.

Christmas was never been a really big deal in my (small) family – apart from a few times when I was very little, it was just the four of us and presents aside, it wasn’t that different from a normal Sunday (we didn’t even have turkey because one third of the family’s meat eaters – my brother – didn’t like it). As I grew into my teens, its specialness ebbed away even further – my dad had to drag us out of bed for lunch – and so when I left home for uni and beyond, I didn’t feel the need to create a big production of my own. For a couple of years, we (me, the ex and a friend) had an unusual-for-us roast dinner but did little else to celebrate (and it was lamb not turkey, and involved a whole lot of chilli). But pretty much since then … nothing.

Such pressure – and such waste

Probably because it’s never really meant that much to me, it was easy for me to leave it behind and now that I’m completely out of it, I find it hard to comprehend how much pressure some people put themselves under in the name of the season – not everyone, not by any means, but a lot of people. The pressure of finding the perfect present or affording an ever growing pile of more expensive presents, the pressure of cooking the perfect meal, the pressure of finding the perfect tree, the pressure of everyone getting along, the overall ongoing pressure to make this year better than it was last year and to make sure everyone has a good time… I’ve had a good number of people (adults rather than kids) tell me that they don’t enjoy Christmas at all, but it’s just something they feel they “have” to do, especially if they have kids. It riles me when people do things because they feel they “should” rather than actively want to do it.

And it’s not just that – the greenie/anti-consumerist in me is obviously outraged at the excess and waste too – the presents-for-presents-sake, the packaging, the food… Basically, it pushes a lot of my buttons.

Every day is special

I think some people think I’m just a Scrooge-ish, contrary bah-humbug type but I’m really not. I just don’t see why 25th Dec is any more worthy of celebration than 19th February or a random Thursday. I see friends & family when I want, we have nice meals when we want and I give presents to people when I see something I think that person would really like or need, rather than keeping it until the end of the year. I would rather enjoy the whole year than saving up all my festive juices for just a couple of days.

I’m not saying that people shouldn’t celebrate Christmas, not in the slightest. I’ll admit that I can see why the old celebration was revived in the 19th century as it gave people something special to look forward to in the middle of winter and I could probably do with more events to look forward to in my calendar – but for me, right now, it’s not worth all the stress and waste.

Rhonda on Down to Earth recently talked about how her Christmases have evolved over the years with the coming and growing of children, and soon grandchildren. Perhaps we’ll be more interested when we start a (non-animal) family in a few years – but coming from a place of rejecting it all, I suspect we’ll pick and choose what bits we do more than most.

If you don’t also celebrate Christmas, I’d love to hear why.

Frozen beck, unfrozen pipes

Posted by louisa on Thursday 23 December 2010 in DIY | 2 comments

I took these pictures of the beck (stream) at the bottom of our garden yesterday afternoon.

(Downstream/upstream respectively)

And I took this picture of the water pipe in our kitchen after we’d finished mopping up 3 mop buckets of water from the kitchen floor.

Sigh.

Christmas, according to Agnes Jekyll

Posted by louisa on Thursday 23 December 2010 in meta | 0 comments

(1922! Imagine what she’d think of Christmas in the 21st century!)

Baking bread in the winter – how do you do it?

Posted by louisa on Wednesday 22 December 2010 in cooking, frugal | 12 comments

We’ve got out of the swing of baking bread recently – partly due to general winter lethargy and partly due to the fact that we’d struggle to get yeast do its thing.

It would be very difficult to grow a slow rise bread – one that needs a good 12-18 hours to rise. With our woodburners in the office & living room, we get a room temperature of 16-18C (60-65F) for a few hours during the day but for the rest of the time, it is much lower than that. The kitchen is poorly insulated (it’s an addition away from the main body of the house with lots of windows and a hard-to-insulate flat roof) so has frequently been see-your-breath chilly (especially last week when the central heating was out and it was even colder than normal). Opinions differ on the ideal temperature for yeast activity but it’s typically seen as 25-35C (75-95C) – we don’t even come close to that. (Admittedly we rarely come close to that even at the height of summer but it’s warmer, and more consistently warmer, than it is now.)

I’m loathed to use the (electric) oven as a warming box – not only would it be using energy, it would need a lot of management – turning it on and off – since the temperature setting doesn’t go anywhere near low enough for the oven thermostat to manage it. And 12-18 hours of that sort of management isn’t realistic.

Lethargy aside, we would like to get back into baking bread ASAP – it would save a lot of frozen-faced walks to the shop and, of course, shops are going to be closed over the next couple of weekends anyway/out of stock because of snow issues.

We could possibly manage some shorter rise time breads when a woodburning is running – leaving them for longer to account for it still being a bit cool – or even, if I had to do it, in the oven. That’s not out of the question, I’m just a sucker for slow rise bread: I haven’t perfected a non-slow rise loaf recipe yet and I suspect now might not be the time to work on one!

Are you still baking bread at the moment? How are you managing? Have you got any suggestions for things I could try? Or got a fool proof pretty-quick-rising loaf recipe?

An expensive lesson

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 21 December 2010 in DIY | 0 comments

As I mentioned in my “spending during my no spend week” round-up, our boiler broke and had to be fixed this week.

It stopped working last Sunday – we thought it was just a sensor playing up but when the plumber replaced the thermostats on Tuesday evening, it still didn’t fix the problem so he had to come back on Saturday – replaced another thing (essentially a £35 washer on the diverter valve), went through a whole load of troubleshooting then replaced something else, something more expensive, something electronic. And you know what? if we’d acted earlier, we could have avoided all of it.

We hadn’t had the boiler serviced in the year and a bit since we moved in. We knew we should but didn’t get around to it.

A few months ago, we noticed that there was something leaking very, very slightly (the washer thing on the diverter valve) but we pretty much ignored it – we’d get it fixed when we got it serviced and getting it serviced was on “to do at some point” list.

Those with a speedy intellect may have made the leap that, with hindsight, is painfully obvious. The leak dripped onto electronic control board and after a couple of months of occasional dripping, the board decided it had had enough.

After finally fixing it, the plumber did a service – he thought it was possibly the first service it had ever had, in its eight years of use, not just our 15 months here – and between that, all the parts & the rest of his labour, it cost us £292 – and left us without any central heating or hot water for a week in the middle of winter. (Our woodburners did a great job of keeping us warm in the living room and office, but the rest of the house was chilly and felt increasingly damp as the week went on.)

If we’d had a service and had the diverter valve thing replaced when we first noticed the drip, it would have cost us about £90 in total. The boiler would also have been running inefficiently because of eight years of build up.

We’ve learnt a very important lesson about maintenance – and about how procrastination can cost you a lot more money in the long run. I really hope we apply the knowledge in the future!