Christmas

Christmas is such a monster topic that I am not really sure I want to tackle it in a blog entry. Which in part explains why I am several days late in doing so.

Christmas is colours and lights and anticipation and disappointment and memories and nostalgia and childhood and cliché and more colours and pressure and family and travelling and spending and eating and chocolate.

Christmas is a carefully-manufactured bread-and-circuses event to get us through the hard winter months (obviously speaking as someone who has never experienced a festive season in the southern hemisphere). Christmas is the ultimate celebration of the excesses of consumerism, encouraged by the minute rich elite that run this show and stand to profit. It is all the more successful because guilt is removed, as all this consumption takes place in the guise of giving, of sharing, and of tradition. I wonder if anyone has done the maths and calculated the effect on the economy, GDP, ecology etc. if Christmas, or at least all aspects of it pertaining to consumption, was simply eliminated? To take the art of bah-humbugism to an extreme, I wonder if this consumer-fest has reached such a level of excess, that its removal would alone be enough to bring human consumption of the planet’s resources down to some form of sustainable equilibrium?

Don’t get me wrong. I actually like Christmas. It appeals to the big kid in me. I like the colours and lights and the ease of access to chocolate. I like the challenge of dreaming up gifts for people – the puzzling, the reflection, the light-bulb moment when I hit up an idea that seems to suit the needs and desires of the recipient. If I had the time and abilities, I would happily home-make gifts rather than buy them. The only time I resent the gifting obligations is for certain awkward members of in-law-type families, with whom we have little in common and limited knowledge of their tastes and preferences. Then the pressure of finding something for the sake of it, appropriate or otherwise, just because we have to because they will give us something, overshadows the pleasures of present-hunting. Yet I participate in this charade, and not really for the sake of keeping up appearances, but because it seems like the right thing to do.

Then, as the cliché goes, Christmas is a time for family. The pleasures and the pressures of making time, for once, for people that mean so much to us, or else mean so much to someone who means so much to us (the whole in-law issue rearing its ugly head in a big way). I really do not want to dive into the murky waters of this topic, but further to my last entry (Waiting for the end), I want to acknowledge that I have just had the privilege of sharing a second “last Christmas” with a loved one. I have once again lovingly participated in the challenge of making a “last” Christmas together special. As with everything, we only really appreciate such privileged shared moments when it is almost too late – and I can only remain eternally grateful for the unexpected length of “almost” that we, this time, have been granted. 

The person in question keeps apologising for “ruining” another Christmas. We both had to acknowledge that if it wasn’t for the circumstances, chances are we would not have all been together for at least one of the two Christmases concerned. Uncountable numbers of people will have just spent their last Christmas together, or missed the opportunity to do so, without knowing it until it is too late. There is really something to be said for living every moment as if it was the last.