Christmas Shadow

    Christmas sucks! Yes, I know you are not supposed to say that, but I wish to make a case that for some of us it does. It does so, personally, socially, culturally, ethnically, psychologically, and every way except for the market that force, stronger than gravity which runs the whole show.
    My own reactions to 'The Festive Season' are so anti social that I cannot express them to many friends and relatives because they are part of the problem.
    Should I say I dislike or am quite uncomfortable with Christmas several reprisals follow. An early response can be to question my mental health.
    There is an imperative to conform. 'Of course, you are not serious?' 'How could you not like Christmas?' 'But you must admit...' And there follows an explanation you know is defensive and one where I am the problem. If you dislike what the majority likes you must be deficient, suspect even, because you see things so differently. You are treated as was the first person to dare to say that the earth circles the sun.
    Even though the vectors driving belief in the Season are illogical or bogus or outdated and such that many of the proponents only half believe what they are advocating, they seem to feel duty bound to persuade you to change your heretical ideas.
    I own this stance is deeply personal, offensive even, and in the opposite direction from the popular procession. Personal scars of trauma contribute to my position. Yes. When I was ten on Christmas Eve, I had been trying to catch a cicada as a tangible present for myself for Christmas. I fell out of a tree and landed upside down on a sharp stump. I was terrified when I saw the muscle or tissue or fat poking out of the wound as I limped home.
    I knew my parents felt obliged to do the Santa thing and that they did not have a lot of money to spend and worse, that they would choose age inappropriate presents for me. They would miss the mark but would have fulfilled the Christmas gift injunction.
    The pain in my thigh kept me awake that night. I heard my parents arguing about the quality and quantity of the Santa drop.
Mum was accusing Dad of being niggardly and because I held a similar view it was squirmingly painful to hear.
    Next morning the bundle of disposables at the end of the bed included an orange coloured ten shilling note. It concretised Mum's judgment of Dad; her victory and their scale of values and Dad's having to pay for his humiliation.
    That event was underpinned by the epistemological
 or identity problems of who Santa was and why the ruse should exist at all.
    Most parents seem to enact without question the validity of the culturally supported ruse. Santa is written to, visits an impossible number of houses, enters via a chimney, parks a sled with reindeer team in all insolence-eats and drinks festal offerings and moves on to the next house. No wonder we have an obesity problem in Santa countries. He does all this after arriving from some Nordic location via shopping mall photo ops.
    Folklorists dispute the emoluments of the season; the tree, the music, the snow, the revealed theology of the day and the national variations-which are of course Eurocentric.
    There is no common sense nor veracity in nostalgia. And nostalgia operates at much deeper levels than what is visible or logical. It is excellent preparation for believing 'false truths'.
    Familiarly Christmas is like putting on an old boot. The younger the wearer the better the fit. Then there is a divide between those who find reassurance in an aged pair of archaic slippers and the ache of misshapen feet bunions and all shoehorned into what once worked comfortably.
    Forget, for a moment, about those who echo the regressions to childhood or the joy of giving an appreciated present. Think instead of the others who quake at the annual reenactment , those who have neither the money, the desire or friends and relatives with whom to meet. Or those non neo-europeans who have their own feasts and rituals. For the bereaved there is the reminder of painful ongoing losses. For the lonely the pain of isolation and being radically different as well as resenting those who mindlessly glide through.
    
    Then there are those like me who try to conform, pull on the old boot without too many audible aches and groans. Those who try to do their best while knowing how thin is the veneer of conformity so as
to please someone else.
    There is an old story of two adolescent youngsters of noble Italian families who declared they wanted, beyond all else, to be married and live happily ever after. The story goes that the adults consulted a wise old bishop (Yes it was a long time ago). His grace advised handcuffing the ardent pair to each other and to a comfortable large bed for a few days. The elders followed the advice and the deflated youngsters saw more than the light.
    And the connection with Christmas? Psychologists, sociometrists and historians, with a capital H and anyone with a memory know a Christmas gathering is fraught. Just look at it:a group of sibling rivals, a squark of generations, an array of injured, hurt and damaged relationships, a mob of people who never see or visit one another throughout the year, with a stack of unfinished business the size of colonisation are supposed to sit, eat, drink together in some magic social balm swallowing any hypocrisy. Until on the way home when they can take the strips off the attendees confidentially.
    Our Irish mob was would never let a family relationship get in the way of a cutting remark.
    Many times I have heard from a combatant about physical fisticuff boil overs which followed the pudding or the game of backyard cricket liberally fuelled by the lubrications of the liquid spirit of the season. Which outbursts, though alarming carry an authenticity greater than the enforced saccharine social endearments and blistering kisses.
    Yeah, Nah it's really only the merchants who profit from Christmas. Even if they have to forego a bit of repriced hard to shift produce for the Boxing Day sales. They don't give a rat's whether it is a gift to a beloved or a tick the box token. A sort of have to because it is expected part of a transaction. Which this kind of stuff, come to think of it, is not a gift anymore than are taxes, or rates gifts we love to give.
    Usually days of national celebration accrue from a major proud victory or death or national achievement. Sometimes these events have a religious origin. Which is fine if you are religious, preferably of the same theological flavour as the event or are willing to adopt the dress, customs, tucker of that group.
    If you are not you can use the event like the Italian second hand car dealers in the Boston St Patrick's day parade who sit in open top convertibles decked in green and sporting oversized green rosettes.
    What is bothersome for the purists is when the annual recall celebration has lost almost any connection with the foundation it recalls. Celebrating by gift swapping of non essential items, spending energy on lights at Christmas seems to have lost a foundation in reality if it is based on a poor couple, unable to get accommodation other than an animal shelter where she brings forth her first son.
    The closest group to this family are starving refugees who would be mightily helped if even a proportion of the Western World Christmas expenditure were allotted to these deserving helpless people. 

    Cultural appropriation of snow and decorated trees are now endorsed as seasonal necessities. It can be tricky. In a Japanese attempt to join in; Santa, in red and white, has been depicted nailed hands and feet to a cross. A sort of covering all bases messianic icon.

    
    Are there seasonal survival mechanisms for refugees of this seasonal behaviour? There are at least two. One, banish reason, common sense, social conscience, past hurt and offence and go along for the ride.
    Two, get out of town, to another culture if you can, or go walking in the bush,Yes, sing to yourself if you like and write.

Michael D. Breen