Christmas hypocrisy

In this exclusive excerpt from "Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior," Miss Manners brings her patented wit and unfailing wisdom to Christmas Day and presents.By Judith Martin

Christmas is an important day for everyone to practice hypocrisy. Does that offend you? Miss Manners is so excessively polite that she rarely has the wicked pleasure of offending people, and you must allow her to relish the sensation for a moment before she explains what she means and spoils the effect.

There now. Miss Manners feels quite herself again and is prepared to discuss Christmas behavior with appropriate sobriety. What she means is that Christmas is an excellent time for people to forgo the honest expression of their true feelings and adjust — not to say dissemble — their behavior in order to cater to the feelings of others. Take the difficult matter of midafternoon on Christmas Day. Everyone always feels cross then. This is perfectly understandable. They have been up too early. They have had little rest the night before, either because they have had visions of sugar plums dancing in their heads or because they were trying to put together a vision for someone else, which had some of the parts or the directions missing and should have been put together by the store, which refused to do so.

Some people are cross because they did not get what they wanted, and some are cross because they did and are now tired of it or are feeling postpartum depression. Some people are stiff from sitting in church, and others are stiff from sitting on the floor with the electric trains, and some are both.

Those who have Christmas dinner at night are cross because they are starved, and those who have it at midday are cross because they are overstuffed, and all of them are beginning to wish they had not eaten the candy canes off the tree.

Christmas hypocrisy requires that everyone conceal these feelings and behave kindly and patiently to others. It is especially important on Christmas that children be reinforced in their hypocritical behavior. Children must be taught to express pleasure and surprise when they open presents, concealing their actual assessment of the acquisitions if this is inconsistent with the official emotions. They must be instructed to refrain from making such true statements as "I already have one." And they must be taught the unnatural act of reading the card before opening the package. They must also be forced into another unnatural act, that of sitting down and writing letters of thanks immediately — letters that express enthusiasm and gratitude with the best artifice they can muster in order to make the emotion sound genuine. (This is, incidentally, an excellent midafternoon activity for calming down overexcited children. Their little eyelids will be drooping in boredom in no time, and there will be a merciful moment of quiet in the house.)

Even adults accustomed to faking verbal and written joy often need practice in Christmas hypocrisy. It is not easy to sound convincing when one is expressing a wish to "help." Everyone at a Christmas gathering should be falsely shining with the apparent desire to set the table, pick up the torn wrappings, go for a walk in the snow as far as the garbage can and fix the children's malfunctioning toys. If you do not like the term "hypocrisy," Miss Manners will permit you to call it "doing unto others."

Merry Christmas Everyone!