Another Christmas is just around the corner and the usual crap songs, decorations, routines and sales drives have been rolled out and I can’t help but feel dreary & uninterested – more so each year. Of course I can’t display this apathy or I’ll be accused of not getting into the ‘spirit’. Like any child, Christmas was always special for me, something magical and different and I remember hanging onto it for as long as I could. Even when I found out that the main man wasn’t real around 12/13 I pretended he was!
So why am I now starting to dislike Christmas? Is it the fault of businesses who overdo it each year and start selling to us too early, or is it the media’s fault for brainwashing us with Lennon, Slade, McGowan, etc.., or is it jut me getting old and (more) cynical..?
I’ve also got another problem with Christmas that I’ve only just realised in recent years which says a lot about how much we all forget what Christmas is supposed to be about. I am reliably informed that Christmas is a celebration of the birth of Christ and not a celebration of overeating, overdrinking, overspending and the rest of it.. so primarily its a religious festival. Trouble is that I was raised Atheist/Agnostic and have no religious beliefs or practices at all, especially when it comes to Christianity. So am I even allowed to participate in Christmas? I’d go ask a local priest if I wasn’t scared of being struck down for being so un-religious!
The small part of me that still holds a flame for Christmas wishes that I could for once experience the kind of Christmas that is marketed to us constantly, ie – snow, log cabins, fir tree forests, sleighs, reindeer, proper carols, etc.. and one of these years I hope to see a white Christmas in Ireland but I think thats getting less likely with global warming. The only other option is to spend a Christmas in Lapland or Canada or somewhere with a more authentic Christmas experience than the depressing, wet affair we usually have in northwest Ireland.
Anyway after pondering the question for a while now I suppose the only conclusion I can come to is that Christmas is whatever you want it to be like anything else in life. Its really just a state of mind, if you are capable of suspending your sense of logic and reality, packing away the cynicism, imagining something different and blocking out the tackyness then you can maybe get something out of it, an escape, a break from the norm, a remembrance of childhood or a glimpse of long lost innocence.
Leon.
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