Opinion: 'Don't ask us about Christmas, we just make it!'

What kind of belief system would invent glittering baubles with fat guys and angels stuck to them, to hang in artificial trees?

Right now I am one with the people of Yiwu, China where most of the world's Christmas tat is made, who may be said to cry with one underpaid voice, from a probably unsafe workplace, "Don't ask us about Christmas, we just make it!"

I will be making. I am always making. Also I am always forgetting - to post Christmas cards, to buy presents, what day it is. I cook.

Of course the fat guy with the big white beard means nothing to the Chinese in Yiwu,and what have reindeer got to do with anything? What kind of belief system would invent glittering baubles with fat guys and angels stuck to them, to hang in artificial trees? And why would apparently sane people wear fake antlers on their heads one day a year, like mad Morris dancers? Is this a deep, unconscious regression to a prehistoric past?

They don't ask such questions in the Dongyang Nuoya Art & Crafts Co, one of 800 businesses servicing the annual glitter-and-gutsing festival with which we celebrate - as if anyone much cares - the birth of the founder of Christianity. They're probably glad to have jobs.

There may be 100 million Christians in China, officially an atheist state.

In this country, nominally a Christian one, the last Census (2013) tells us there was a decline of roughly 20 per cent overall in the numbers of leading Christian churches' membership since the previous (2006) Census.

Oddly enough there was also a decline in the number of people professing no religion, a glitch explained by burgeoning new immigrant groups, among them Hindus and Muslims.

Which goes to show that we are a declining market for the tat on which the people of Yiwu depend to feed their families, an un-Christian state of affairs comparable to my own annual season of ill-will, when once again I grumble about, baking Christmas cakes and glazing hams that never look as wonderful as they do in magazines.

I look forward to a festival of things boiling over internally as well as externally, the fate of this country's mothers as the family squabbles, the TV blares inanities and gift wrap forms a tidal wave on the floor.

To think I gave up alcohol. I must be mad.

If so, I have plenty of company, and not just quietly weeping mothers and wives who imagined that one day, somehow, Christmas would be like it was in old story books, and they would beam fatuously, with joy in their hearts, at kids behaving nicely for once, and fathers who, equally for once, have not beaten the familiar path to the shed with a bottle under one arm.

As we know, women are the people who just make the stuff, caterers for big family events, and cleaners-up afterwards, when everyone mysteriously vanishes.

You might think it good news that older women fare better in the jobs market than older men, as the retirement commissioner tells us, but this is explained by their low-paid work in vast numbers in aged care, education and cleaning.

We haven't yet reached the point where older men willingly wipe other people's bottoms or clean their dunnies for - comparatively - the pay of a Chinese maker of tinsel.

You can keep Santa, another old white man who gets to do the fun bits and get all the praise while his slaves toil in the Arctic.

As the Trump Administration will show, the world is still run by rich old white men like him, multimillionaire and billionaire executives and retired generals, not domestic goddesses - not unless they look like Melania, and have to ask the way to their own kitchens in sexy Slavic accents.

At least the school year is over, and parents don't have to help with homework any more.

Wellington financial educator Dean Blair says he was shocked to find that only 10 per cent of primary school children on his money courses had help from parents to complete the homework he set them.

Homework is yet another domestic chore for exhausted women, busy tying up cellophane packets of home-baked Florentine biscuits that will be soggy by Christmas, but will at least show they tried.

Fathers are too busy or bossy to help at this time of year, what with the rounds of office parties to attend, and I can only relate to what Blair called parents' "lack of engagement."

Money and sex are two topics that should never be discussed in polite families. As the poet put it, Human beings cannot bear very much reality.