Christmas
Those of you who have been following my rambles since last Christmas will know the story of the glass angel. As the decorations were taken down, she threw herself from the top of the tree, breaking a wing. Bob M. stuck her together and she was consigned to the attic to await this Christmas.
I am not sure if she read the same newspaper article that I did, about angels and fairies being out of favour and stars being the in thing for trees, but she definitely did not want to be up there this year. As we stood back to admire our handiwork she lunged forward and broke into five pieces on the floor. Again Bob M. wielded the superglue but she was more determined still and at the first opportunity plummeted from his table. This time she was in so many pieces repair was impossible - she had obviously been suffering clinical depression and committed suicide after a history of self-harming.
I get the impression that many of us feel this way at Christmas. Psychologists tell us that Christmas is up there with death and divorce as a cause of depression and suicide. As a child I was not the greatest fan but there was a frisson of excitement engendered by preparations and celebrations at school. My family were not of the socialising kind, parties were out of the question and most of the day itself was dominated by church and my mother’s anxiety about lunch. She was a poor cook having been brought up in India where there were kitchen staff and attended a boarding school for young ladies where cookery was not taught. She also happened to hate eating and, therefore, preparing Christmas pudding, rich fruitcake and especially marzipan. She was not a happy bunny.
Strangely, Christmas improved for me when I left home and moved into a nurses’ home; often ending up working. In those days there were always interesting festivities in hospitals, carol singing with our cloaks red side out, visits from the Salvation Army and local choirs, dressing-up by those who should have known better, and the carving of huge turkeys by Consultant Surgeons. Nowadays turkey comes in plastic flat packs, patients are chucked out (sorry – discharged) as quickly as possible, wards closed so that minimum staff members are paid overtime and decorations are banned in case they harbour MRSA or Clostridium Difficile, as if a more likely cause were not the general lack of basic hygiene. (Sorry, personal hobbyhorse!)
Christmas seems to start earlier every year so that by the time it comes you cannot believe there is so little time left to do the necessary chores. Why do we have to buy presents for people whose tastes we do not know? Why do we have to fill the larder as if the shops will never open again? Why do we keep on about the traditional Christmas when in fact there is no such thing? The ancients borrowed Roman Saturnalia as they did not know they true date of Christmas. The Victorians may have popularised the tree, the paper chains and the cards but feasting was around long before then. Cromwell’s lot went around confiscating food. Carols and seasonal hymns were banned by the Puritans and it was many years before they resurfaced. Unless we work for the supermarkets that will be open (with Easter eggs) on the 27th we can have up to two weeks holiday but Dickens writes about Bob Cratchett being lucky to be given the afternoon off work.
All this is supposed to be because we are celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ. It is so commercialised, however, that Christianity does not get a look in. We have “Winter Festival” street decorations and crude secular joke cards. I am sure Jesus despairs of all this, he values the little things. Anyone can throw money at unsuitable presents but He just wants a personal relationship with us.
