Monday, 3 December 2007

Who Stole Christmas Cheer?

Got my first Christmas card this weekend and it spun me into a tizzy… I’m not organised at all. So I trotted off to face the big bright lights of the city and after two hours of soul destroying indecency I returned home empty handed. Where did all the Christmas spirit go?

After enduring ignorant people stepping in front of me, people causing mayhem in an attempt to secure the last car park space and much ‘tutting’ at the sales assistant, the final straw came when I overheard a young lady talking to her friend saying ‘that’ll do for so-in-so’… as she picked up items from the stores gift selection. It made me think of how many presents will be opened on Christmas morning to bring disappointment or at best disinterest, simply because they were bought for the sake of giving rather than with the receiver in mind… I felt so sad. I always thought that the joy of Christmas was in the giving of gifts, but it would seem ‘not today’.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not really religious but I do try to keep the real sentiment of Christmas in mind… I mean I know that the X in Xmas comes from the Greek word ‘Chi’ which means Christ, so technically its okay to shorten ‘Christmas’ to ‘Xmas’… but I feel I’m not Greek so I should stick to keeping the Christ in Christmas, even if this means my hand gets cramp writing it into so many cards. I think it’s important.

I mean, if the magic of Christmas was to be swallowed up by mean-spirited shallowness it’s hard to imagine anything else keeping acts of kindness and human decency alive. Its only having lived thro’ eleven and a half months of disrespect, road enraged selfishness that you realise every one of us ‘needs’ Christmas to keep up the delusion that our lives are actually beautiful. Mebbe it’s not the parcels around the tree that is the real gift at Christmas, but perhaps it’s this realisation that humans can sometimes be selfless that is precious.

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