All I want for Christmas is a crowbar and some crockery

Christmas. The most wonderful time of the year. A season of joy, goodwill, and togetherness.

Or, if you’re being honest: a pressure cooker of family dysfunction, financial stress, and forced jollity that would make even Santa reach for the brandy before noon.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Christmas as much as the next person who’s watched A Muppet Christmas Carol seventeen times while ugly-crying into a tin of Heroes. But let’s not pretend it’s all twinkling lights and perfect family moments. For many, the festive season can bring a very specific kind of rage, the sort that simmers quietly under forced smiles at the dinner table.

Because here’s what the John Lewis ad won’t tell you: Christmas can generate proximity rage like nothing else. You know the feeling when you’ve been cooped up with relatives for hours, and someone’s chewing gets so loud you contemplate violence? Or when your mother makes another pointed comment, and you have to resist the urge to launch a mince pie at her head?

That’s proximity rage. And this year, there are places you can take it.

Enter the rage room. These glorious temples of destruction have been popping up across the UK, offering stressed-out punters the chance to don protective gear and smash the absolute bejesus out of old electronics, crockery, and furniture. Shatterhaus, on Cardiff’s Queen Street, will let you “unleash your stress by smashing objects with various tools” at a bargainous £22.50 for fifteen minutes of cathartic destruction.

The timing couldn’t be better, could it? Just when many need an outlet for all that festive fury, someone’s monetised our rage and packaged it up as self-care.

I’ll be honest, the concept appeals to me on a visceral level. I’ve never actually been to one, but I think about it. A lot. The idea of taking a baseball bat to inanimate objects feels about the right level of catharsis for the season. 

But here’s where it gets complicated. The science on the effectiveness of rage rooms is mixed. Psychologists warn they might provide short-term relief, but don’t address underlying anger issues. Worse, they could reinforce aggressive coping patterns by training your brain to respond to frustration with violence.

Which is fine when you’re surrounded by safety gear and condemned electronics. It’s less fine when you’re at Christmas dinner, and Uncle Malcolm launches into his annual sermon on immigration.

Still, here’s what strikes me: at least rage rooms are honest. They acknowledge that sometimes, we’re not just gently frustrated but properly, justifiably angry. And maybe it’s healthier to admit that rage exists than to suppress it under a veneer of forced Christmas cheer.

Because Christmas isn’t easy for everyone. For some, it’s a reminder of loss, of people who should be at the table but aren’t. For others, it’s financial stress dressed up in fairy lights and expected gratitude. For many, it’s just exhausting; the expectations, the cooking, the emotional labour of keeping everyone happy while your own stress levels hit the roof.

And this year? We’re doing it all while swimming in what Oxford University Press has just named its Word of the Year: “rage bait.”

Defined as online content deliberately designed to make you furious, usage of this phrase has tripled this year. While you’re trying to create Hallmark movie vibes in your living room, your phone is serving you an endless buffet of manufactured outrage. Your uncle’s sharing conspiracy theories in the family group chat. Instagram’s showing you everyone else’s perfect Christmas, complete with matching PJs and children who actually smile for photos.

It’s all rage bait, mun, just wrapped in tinsel.

So we’re drowning in algorithmic fury while trying to smile through rubbery turkey, questions about our love lives, and endless board games. No wonder we want to smash things.

Here’s my take: if a rage room helps you blow off steam so you don’t actually lose it at the dinner table, then chwarae teg. Mental health professionals say that, for some people, physically expressing anger can be a gateway to deeper emotional work. So it’s not a solution, but it might be a release valve. And sometimes, that’s enough to get us through.

What I really want, though, is for us to stop pretending. Can we all just admit that the festive season can be hard? That family is complicated? That sometimes, love and rage exist in the same room at the same time, and that’s completely okay.

And if you need to book yourself into a rage room to survive the season? Bloody do it. Smash that telly. Obliterate those plates. Let it out somewhere where the only casualty is a knackered toaster heading for landfill.

Because acknowledging your rage doesn’t make you a bad person, it makes you human. Pretending everything’s perfect when you’re secretly fantasising about hurling the turkey out the window? That’s what does the most damage.

So this year, I’m giving myself permission to feel whatever I feel and to admit that Christmas is exhausting even when it’s wonderful. 

As for the rage bait that lives in my phone? It can wait until January. Right now, I have an alarming quantity of cheese to eat, a sofa with my name on it and a rage room saved to my bookmarks. Just in case.

Nadolig Llawen, everyone. May your turkey be moist, your relatives bearable, and your rage entirely justified.