For mental health's sake, let's consider banning Christmas for good!

Customers shop at Naivas Supermarket along Moi Avenue in Nairobi on December 23, 2025. [Boniface Okendo, Standard] 

Christmas has come gone, and the new year approaches, but the damage the entire festive season shall inflict on the overall mental health of millions of Kenyans is incalculable.

Do not get me wrong - I am not Ebenezar Scrooge who hated Christmas in Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol - absolutely not!

But I did not start the debate on the veracity of Christmas - the debate on whether Christmas and its partner in crime, the New Year Day, should be “banned” is not entirely new.

Back in 2008, Croatia government banned all Christmas and New Year Day parties nationwide. Prime Minister Ivo Sanader also issued an order prohibiting civil servants from buying or giving Christmas and New Year gifts.

At the time, Croatia was going through an economic turmoil so devastating that the government was contemplating freezing salaries for all civil servants. The mental health of Croatians around the Christmas of 2008 can only be imagined.

Perhaps Cuba’s President Fidel Castro had mental health in mind when he banned Christmas in his country for 32 years during his 49-year reign. Whether or not the mental health of Cubans—spared the anxiety of buying Christmas presents and expensive family gatherings for 32 years—was better or worse is a subject best left to researchers.

But it is not just among secular leaders that Christmas has been frowned upon. Around the same time Croatia was banning Christmas, Reverend Martin Swan of Trinity Methodist Church, Manchester, was quoted by BBC, calling for Christmas to be removed from the Christian calendar.

The man of God, besides arguing that Christmas was “borrowed from pagan festivals,” dismissed the entire period as “a season of madness.”

A number of mental health researchers agree that the Christmas season is, and has always been bad for mental health—that more people attempt suicide, more families break up, and more people report anxiety during this period.

And according to a presidential task force report on mental health whose findings are gathering dust somewhere in State House, Nairobi, (the same one that recommended, among other things, that mental ill health in Kenya be declared a national emergency) one in every four Kenyans may be, either knowingly or unknowingly, battling a mental health disorder characterised by anxiety, depression as well as alcohol and substance abuse.

And Christmas made matters worse.

You do not need to consult a professor of mental health to understand the damage Christmas inflicted on our mental health—not when ‘Dr Google’, assisted by modern-day AI, is available. Just type “Christmas and anxiety,” and voila!

“Christmas anxiety is common, stemming from financial pressure, family dynamics, social expectations, and perfectionism, leading to feelings of being overwhelmed, lonely, or stressed by the ‘perfect holiday’ ideal.”

The damage may have been worse on children, with available research calling on parents to watch out for withdrawal symptoms and irritability before, during and after Christmas festivities.

Experts warn that dragging young ones to family gatherings to “celebrate Christmas” may not have been a good idea after all—especially for children used to predictable personal spaces.  Add to this the peer pressure of what an ideal Christmas ought to look like, intensified by heavily edited social media pictures, and you will understand why the young ones may have been better off without Christmas, no matter how many presents you bought them.

And if the festivities are not followed by moments of debriefing and bonding, you might just have lost the young ones after Christmas. You will know when you come face to face with a bunch of withdrawn, easily irritable fellows, most probably brooding about unmet (mostly unrealistic) expectations; anxious about outcomes of the bad choices they made, and battling hurts inadvertently inflicted at family gatherings.

If this is not a wake-up call for you and me to rethink ‘Christmas’—for our children’s and our own mental health’s sake—then maybe we are still so lost in “Christmas madness” that it will take more than detoxifying diets, the gym, and more borrowing, to get us back on our feet once this season of madness is over.