The pleasures that we indulge in at Christmas shouldn’t only be guilty pleasures.
By Max Khan Hayward
Christmas, they say, is the most wonderful time of the year. We take time off of work, gather with friends, and indulge in eating, drinking, music, and merriment. For a brief period, the pleasures we ration through the rest of the year take center stage.
And then, each January, the newspapers fill up with advice on dieting, teetotalism, and the return to work. The prospect of this chilly month, when the guests are gone, the party is over, and soon-to-be-breached resolutions take sway, can even cast its pall over the holidays, our preemptive guilt eating away at our enjoyment: “I’ll regret this extra slice of pie come the New Year,” we tell ourselves. It’s as though the pleasures that we indulge in at Christmas can only ever be guilty pleasures.
Boisterous Christmas festivities have long been controversial. The Bible repeatedly commands the faithful to reject the pleasures of the flesh. The Puritans regarded Christmas as a sinful pagan festival, and made a point of working on Christmas Day to show off their virtue. Christmas celebrations were frowned upon, and sometimes banned, in colonial New England; the day was not a federal holiday until 1870.
Many philosophers have agreed with religious moralists about the worthlessness of fleshly pleasures: eating, drinking, and merriment. Plato thought that the soul was “defiled and impure” if it loved bodily pleasures and things “which one can touch and see and drink and eat and employ in the pleasures of love.” He believed that those who engaged in “gluttony” and “drunkenness” would be reincarnated as asses. The Stoics counseled their followers to suppress their emotions and regard sensory pleasure with indifference. Immanuel Kant thought that feasting and drunkenness were immoral, reducing humans below the level of animals, and warned against accepting invitations to banquets.
But not all philosophers have been such scrooges. Perhaps the philosopher who best embodied the Christmas spirit was the atheist David Hume, a man blessed with a jolly temperament (not to mention a rotund physique and fondness for red coats) worthy of a philosophical Santa Claus. In his view, to be a good person was to have qualities that were “useful or agreeable” to oneself and to other people. In contrast to Kant’s dour moralism and Plato’s otherworldliness, Hume thought that the best kind of person was someone cheerful, witty, and fun to be around.
Excerpt from theatlantic.com. The full article is quite long. Below is the link, if you're interested.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/christmas-merriment-hedonism-philosophy/621010/
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