Christmas, Terminal Felicity

I overdid the cuteness lately, didn’t I? So, off with the cherubs, the kids and any cute animal, into.. Christmas. Just look at all the Christmas pictures. Is it mandatory happiness, childhood memories or something more? Let’s not be all soppy about it. 

Sure. And still, Christmas remains a firm favourite, brushing aside the tears and drama, regardless of time and space, standing tall in our memories – whether loved or not. Yes, there is the glut of red, green and gold decorations, the heaps of food, the pyramids of gifts and general merriment. “They” have long tried to bring you down with the Little Drummer Boy pompopom-poming away, the Little Match Girl dying on our door step, or any odd tearjerker story. Christmas invented the guilt trip. 

And yet. 

New Year is about Fun. Christmas is more than Happiness, it is about Nostalgia. It may be the paragon of cultural dissonance, and because of that, it endures. Christmas stands out even among our ever-more crowded cycle of yearly celebrations. It is not Dry January, Mother’s Day, Halloween, or any religious festival… Christmas is the Big One. No-one even asks you to like it, it just is. It is the apex occasion, if not celebration. Push the door of any shopping mall anywhere in December – try Tokyo, Singapore, Gurgaon, Dubai, Lagos,… Red and Green and Gold everywhere, a paean of humankind. 

Never is this more obvious than when you live abroad. On the 1st of December at the latest, you are snowballed with Happiness. Pine trees. Snow! Especially in Singapore. Like storks or the Sound of Music, geographically restrictive symbols, and yet universal by now. These decorations say: soon, very soon, you will have a break from your 24/7 emails and calls, you will go Home, literally or metaphorically, mentally or physically. Christmas time. When the pace crawls to a stop, and everyone prepares to Go Home

Is it just some kind of cultural dog-whistle, Pavlovian reaction then? 

Christmas is certainly screamed at you. Prayer wheels of songs on the street, in shops, in gas stations: Mariah Carey / Wham / Slade / Mariah Carey / people complaining that it does not snow in Africa / Mariah Carey / … Ching-ching-ching, chong-chong-chong, clanging sistra, cowbells and tambourines ad tinnitus. 

Hark the return of the global celebration of body positivity, modelled by an Old Fat Man. This may be what it visually and auditorily boils down to, but it is not what makes it The Occasion.

Christmas used to be religious but that has been waning since the 80s. As European Christians are truly fun people, I remember studiously waiting to go to mass in the cold damp rain – no snow there either. The legendary Midnight Mass, starting at 00h00, for no other good reason than to hold your food and drinks intake in check. Probably. Huddling down together in the wheezing draft, endure and be counted.

Celebrate the birth of Christ in a manger, decked in your finest jewellery and best furs. 

This is what my family, like many others, did for centuries. And just like you probably, we kids were told about the Story of the Orange on the Dresser. “A sufficient gift back in the day. We were grateful then, as oranges were rare. Not like you, who will receive tomorrow unbelievable gifts. How excited you must be?” ~ my grandmother would say. No pressure then. Gifts had to be extatically the best thing since cold Coca Cola. Christmas as a recognition of your blessings. Demonstrable enthusiasm mandatory. 

This compulsory loop of gratitude can’t be the reason why Christmas stands out either then. Billions of Humans would rather be waiting for New Year instead. New Year has Fun and Fireworks written on it.  

Could it be an Ur-Christmas we feel deep down that speaks to us? A collective, familial and personal memory buried into our human cultural psyche. Green, red and gold. Holly leaves, berries and wealth. The evergreens, the blood and the winter solstice. We made it until now; possibly the oldest human celebration. It just feels right, somehow. The Celts certainly must have had some human sacrifices; they were cool like that. The Mayans were that cool too; remember the End of the World on the Winter Solstice 2012? The Romans had a full-on Carnival Day; they were overall more fun. We got the Midnight Mass thing going. What will Skynet come up with, 500 years from now?

Christmas beats all. The Oldest Occasion that will endure.

This article should have been called “Christmas under the Baobab”, a clever hint at the paragon “ancestor tree” of Africa. A Baobab tree lives for thousands of years, it is its own biosphere, entire ecosystems live on and in it. It is also called the “upside down tree” because its branches look like roots. The Baobab is worth a documentary or two by Sir David Frederick Marmaduke Attenborough. 

~

Each year, Christmas dive-bombs on us from on high. His/her/their/its sleigh turning on the wing, slowly picking up speed. Over the years, he/she/they/it has changed on, shed redundant accessories like the little book of good and bad deeds, and streamlined the message into a payload of gifts to be released in a cloud of red and green glitter. We look up to the sky to smile at Nostalgia. 

Felicity in terminal velocity. 

Christmas will eventually move on to become something else. And we will fall for it. As always. As ever. We don’t even have to like it. 

No need to fear the Reaper, ‘eeeere comes Santa! 

---

Sharing daily 🌍 on Facebook and Instagram.