Matthew Taylor: Bah to humbug! This year I'm determined to enjoy myself

Years ago, the novelist and semiologist Umberto Eco wrote a brilliant essay about the film Casablanca. What gave the movie its particular appeal, he argued, was not its plot or characterisation but the way in which it successfully exploited so many cinematic conventions. He joyously entitled his essay "The Clichés are Having a Ball".

This is the season of clichés. Smiling mum and dad gazing at their cherubic children joyfully plucking tangerines and Brazil nuts from stockings, while in the background the beautifully wrapped presents nestle under the twinkling Christmas tree. You can almost see the snow falling and hear the sleigh-bells ringing and the carols playing while you read this.

Yet many of us feel a profound ambivalence about Christmas, and for a great number of parents the main feelings associated with the time of year are inadequacy and resentment. And this is not restricted to poor parents trying to keep up with the current average Christmas present spend of £300 per child. Research for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that parents living on less than half the earnings of a middle-class family spent nearly as much cash on gifts as the better-off, with often disastrous consequences for family finances. Even those of us who can easily afford PlayStation 2, the new Manchester United kit or Rapunzel Barbie are far from happy with our purchases.

We feel manipulated by advertisers to buy piles of expensive stuff, much of which our kids will be bored with or have broken by the time of the Queen's speech. I do insist on putting fruit in my boys' stockings and, being sensitive to my feelings, they have learnt to feign enthusiasm for the bag of mixed nuts. But my part of the deal is to cram the rest of the space with overpriced gadgets and branded accessories.

We all wish it could be different. What parent hasn't had fantasies of returning to a simpler time when the presents were smaller and fewer and it really was the thought that counted? A time when children were content just to be at home with loved ones, not expecting constant stimulation and entertainment. But in the end we conform, blaming ourselves rather than the advertisers or marketeers for the fact that it never quite goes according to plan.

Christmas brings the gap between the image of domestic bliss and the reality of our lives into relief. No wonder so many situation comedies and plays use Christmas as a context in which to expose the sadness and madness of family life. It is the most common time of year for marriages to break down.

At least I am with my boys over Christmas. This year many people will benefit from two weeks away from the office. While few may enjoy the consumerist side of Christmas, there is the opportunity for parents and children to spend quality time together. But if we value this time with our children, why do so many parents find Christmas holidays exhausting, catching themselves counting the days until the new school term begins?

And what of New Year, supposedly a time for resolutions and hopes for the future? Few of us are looking forward to 2003 with much optimism. The only guaranteed items in the news on 1 January will be the approach of war and continuing concern about the decline of the economy.

Earlier this month it was confirmed that the birth rate in the UK is the lowest since records began. Put this together with many signs of unease and resentment among parents, and it seems as though the commitment and the sacrifice of having children just don't fit with modern values and expectations. In contrast to the stresses and strains of the family Christmas, many of the ever-rising numbers of affluent childless people will spend their time off having a holiday in the sun or on the piste. Christmas can feed the ever-more powerful deficit account of parenting: the growing costs and sacrifices, the escalating risks, and the loss of autonomy and freedom.

The festive season seems to taunt us with our apparent powerlessness to control our own free time, let alone our own lives. Which is why it is also a good time for a rethink, an opportunity to shake off the stresses and impositions of day-to-day life, to remind ourselves about what really matters to us, and to celebrate our families.

Christmas and the New Year is the time to reaffirm the narrative of life. We look back through family traditions, the bringing together of the generations, and forward to a better world through our hopes for our children. Yet, for many reasons, both tradition and hope seem weak and misplaced. If the old stories that gave family its meaning have lost their power for today's middle-class, Christmas nevertheless can still have a purpose. It can be a time when we are able to explore new ways of answering the question of what families are ultimately for. The very idea of the family Christmas seems somehow inappropriate in a world dominated by economic rationality and the constant demands and gratifications of the immediate. Perhaps in this world the notion of enjoying the idiosyncratic traditions of the family Christmas should be seen as culturally subversive.

Despite our guilt about our children, and our frustrations about lack of time, modern parents are doing well. Most women work, yet we spend more time with our children than our parents did. The value of parents and kids being together is often just contented co-existence; you don't have to try to impose quality time on your offspring. There is something almost therapeutic about the humdrum character of Christmas, the daft family traditions, the cracker jokes, sitting round half-asleep watching television. Stop worrying about achieving the perfect Christmas dinner. Instead, enjoy the rare pleasure of the whole family eating together. Christmas reminds us of the soothing qualities of gentle boredom. And perhaps, too, it has a message that we have to be more balanced about commercialism.

Of course, children crave presents, but perhaps when the youngest ones express more interest in the gift-wrapping than the gift, they innocently remind us it is still the symbolism of giving and receiving that really matters. It is a sign of our insecurity as parents that we think our children are going somehow to be permanently scarred or reject us unless they get exactly what they put in their letter to Santa. At the risk of sounding pious, Christmas isn't a bad time to start explaining to your offspring that not everything they see in adverts is true.

One of the features of Christmas is that it is one of the increasingly rare times when the idea of an extended family has some purchase. Instead of conniving in the ageist assumption that grandparents and great aunts are members of some alien race foisted on us for a few days, see them as a reminder of the continuities and achievements of the family.

As for New Year, yes, there are many things to be worried about, many causes to fight. But if we didn't have any hope for a better future why did we have children in the first place? My New Year's resolution is to try to feel a little less of a victim in my relationship with the world, to stop feeling inadequate as a parent, and to remind myself that affluence and technology will offer my children opportunities I didn't have. It really is up to me whether I enjoy 2003 or not, and whether my children have a reasonably contented father to look up to. It's time to heed Umberto Eco's advice and accept Christmas for the cliché that it is: to recognise its awful traditionalism and revel in it. Somehow that feels like an act of defiance.

'What Are Children For?', co-written by Matthew Taylor and his father, Laurie, is to be be published by Short Books early in 2003