DECK YOURSELF WITH BOUGHS OF HOLLY

By Barbara Ehrenreich

The tree is under control, now all that's left to decorate is myself. It used to be enough to observe the holiday privately, with drapes drawn to spare the neighbors our annual frenzy of giving and getting. But now the pressure is on to make some kind of Christmas gesture to every Tom, Dick and Harry who happens along. Take the jolly receptionist in our dentist's office, who started showing up Dec. 1 dressed as a living gift to all humankind, with a huge red bow on the top of her head, ornamental-ball earrings and a scrub shirt in an eye-catching teddy-bear-and-wreath print. So what's my Christmas statement going to be? A simple Santa hat and sequined tree-pin combo, or should I go whole hog with the fluorescent Rudolph sweatshirt and a crown of rubber reindeer antlers?

Maybe it's just that the ever expanding Halloween season has begun to slop over into Christmas. In recent Christmases, "more people are costuming" in season-appropriate wearables, according to Phil Wiseman of Maritz Marketing Research Inc., who does an annual survey of holiday buying habits. Of course, the same can be said of Halloween. Once an occasion when children were sent out to practice the fine art of extortion on the neighbors, Halloween is fast becoming an excuse for adults in feathered masks and body paint to indulge in public foreplay. Already costumes are almost de rigueur, replacing even airline uniforms. I know this because I spent last Halloween evening between planes in a major hub airport, feeling distinctly awkward in slacks and blazer because the ticket agent was a playful witch and the devil himself X-rayed my bags.

At first, I took the growing holiday fashion pressure badly. Wasn't it enough that by Dec. 20 my arches had fallen, my credit cards were maxed out, and my eyes had been blackened in skirmishes at the Beanie Baby counter at Toys "R" Us? The enthusiasm for dressing as Christmas trees brought back painful memories of the Alzheimer's facility where my father spent his final days in a perpetual countdown to the holiday du jour. THE NEXT HOLIDAY IS ARBOR DAY (or whatever), a giant poster near the nursing station announced, AND IT'S ONLY 15 DAYS AWAY!

But I find my Grinch-like stance softening year by year. You can accuse the Christmas costumers of turning Christ's Mass into kitsch. Or you can see them, from a loftier perspective, as the only true celebrants of the original Christmas spirit, which we have tended to lose sight of in recent centuries. Check out the holiday's history: Dec. 25 wasn't chosen because it was the date on Jesus' birth certificate but because that was the time of the ancient Saturnalia, when all of Rome poured into the streets for days of public revelry. Even Christianity couldn't take the urge for orgies out of Christmas. In Europe's Middle Ages, the holiday was celebrated by troops of costumed people going door to door, dancing in the streets, drinking to excess and indulging in a favorite old-time carnival activity: transvestism. Nor were these fun doings restricted to the Christmas season: up to a third of the year was given over to carnivals, each pegged to some ostensibly religious occasion.

Christmas was tamed only recently, when Puritanism and industrialization joined forces to stamp out the seasonal cycle of gluttony and riot. Oliver Cromwell's administration outlawed Christmas in 1657, along with mincemeat pie. As recently as 1886, an American Methodist newspaper sniffed that Christmas is the day "on which more sin and sacrilege is committed than on any other day of the year." The holiday survived into the 20th century only in a subdued and domesticated form--as something to do with one's immediate family, indoors and out of sight. If you wanted to catch a little of that good old-fashioned mob spirit, you could always try to fight your way to the cash register in Macy's on Christmas Eve.

There must be something in us, though, that seeks a carnival. Baby boomers, nostalgic for their lost youth, are blamed for much of this, but the young have always been ingenious at carving out new venues for public play. In the old days, we had happenings; now it's raves or, for the less imaginative, just drinking till you're blotto. On most of these occasions, special clothes or accessories, costumes and masks play a major role, signaling to the average passerby, "Hi, I'm available to party down!"

And this is what my fellow townsfolk are trying to say to the world at large when they accessorize for the season: Christmas isn't just about you and your family and me and mine. It's about you and me and the partying potential inherent in any group of consenting adults--even, or perhaps especially, total strangers.

So, this year I'm going with a holly-berry lipstick and pine-green eye-shadow theme. Families are great, and mine is nearly perfect. But when the holidays come, it's only natural--and traditional--to want to reach out and hug a stranger.