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I don't mean to be a Grinch. I want to love the holidays, really I do. But for some of November and all of December, I feel like I'm being chased by zombie reindeer down a long tunnel lined with elves who are pummeling me with nerf Toys R Us baseball bats. According to a recent research paper by Michael Mutz, sociology professor at the University of Gottingen, Germany, published in the journal Applied Research Quality of Life, I'm not alone.
"The Christmas period is related to a decrease in life satisfaction and emotional well-being," he writes.
Mutz bases this statement on data from the European Social Survey, which queries many thousands of people in 11 European countries, and let Mutz watch how "subjective well-being" waxes and wanes across the calendar year.
Grinches rejoice: Your pessimistic intuitions are correct. People are generally less happy, less satisfied and less emotionally chipper in the lead-up to Christmas. The "Christmas effect" as Mutz calls it is so strong that in non-holiday months, people report positive thoughts outweighing negative thoughts in a 1.22 ratio. During the holidays, negative thoughts overbalance positive thoughts and the ratio drops to 0.97.
What's the reason? Mutz doesn't exactly know, but hypothesizes the things you would expect, namely time pressure, social obligations and financial concerns. What he does know is that highly religious Christians are generally exempt from this dip in holiday well-being.
"Whereas life satisfaction among non-Christians and less religious Christians declines in the (Pre-)Christmas period, it remains rather stable among very religious Christian believers," he writes.
Religious Christians may not experience a massive spike in rapture, but at least they're immune to the population-wide despair that grips the rest of us. Maybe, Mutz opines, the good cheer of the highly religious has to do with what Christmas represents for believers, indifferent pseudo-believers and non-believers, namely "Christmas, Religious Worship, Contemplation and Charity" or "Christmas, Consumption, Commerce and Materialism."
Now we're going beyond the data, but maybe, just maybe, it's not belief in any specific tradition that saves religious Christians from the holiday blues, but an idea that often goes hand-in-hand with religiosity. What if Christmas doesn't come from a store? What if Christmas...perhaps...means a little bit more?
If, like highly religious Christians, your holiday depends on the tall and the small holding hands while singing nonsense lyrics (what exactly is "wassailing" anyway?) and less on ribbons, tags, packages, boxes and bags, perhaps you too can protect your subjective well-being against the assault of the season.
