The (temporary)
creative pause from posting regularly on this blog which I decided to acknowledge
(or give myself – I’m not sure which is closer to the truth; probably both) is something
that I’m actually finding very pleasant. Just tooling around, doing the stuff
that has to be done, spontaneously doing other stuff I feel like doing, it’s
all very relaxing. But then there are other things; the things that fall into
that wide convergence zone between want
to and have to, between can and must.
Including
writing this. I’ve never been a Christmas card person, though I remember their
contribution to that exciting crescendo of anticipation which is my childhood
memory of December, the expectation which is the very soul of the season known
as Advent. Back in the day; a pre-digital age, a time when we didn’t even have
a telephone (imagine that, if you can!) so that communication between people
who didn’t meet regularly was limited to pen and paper, envelopes and stamps,
and a postman on a bicycle.
They came
daily through our letterbox, first a trickle, increasing to a daily flood as
Christmas grew nearer. I remember my mother making a long list of people,
buying cards and sheets of stamps and then writing them all. A few would be
left in reserve to be sent to those from whom cards were received who had been
forgotten on the original list.
And the
cards poured in, being opened and set out on every available surface, when
these were all used up hung from the walls or ceiling on string catenaries. We
use to decorate the house for Christmas in those days too, paper and tinsel
chains and garlands hung from the ceiling. As a kid I loved it all; it turned
the familiar geography of our living room into a wonderful world of glitter and
magic, ruled by the twin sovereigns of the Christmas tree and the crib, Mary
and Joseph, the ox, the donkey and the shepherds all gathered around a central
empty focus, that space where the baby in the manger would be placed on the
evening of Christmas Eve, the first certain signal that Christmas was actually,
inevitably here.
I don’t
know if people still decorate their living rooms in Ireland today they way they used to
do when I was a child. I suspect that fewer do – increased sophistication and a
more developed sense of kitch are
always purchased at the price of a certain innocent naïveté, and one of the
basic facts of temps perdu is that it
is like virginity, once lost it is irretrievable. Maybe this is one of the
deeper reasons why so many adults are ultimately so often disappointed by Christmas;
it is a seductive, insatiable longing for the innocent joy of childhood – a joy
which, if truth be told, was probably never as unalloyed in reality as memory
likes to present it. But memory is inclined to do that, isn’t it?
However, I
realise that my thoughts are wandering in a direction which I had not planned,
a direction with intimations of more darkness than I want in this … this what?
I started
this by mentioning that I’ve never been a Christmas card person – after I left
home, where such things fell primarily in my mother’s area of responsibility, I
somehow never managed to make the exercise part of my own personal
self-organisation. For too long, I suppose, I was intoxicated by the ephemeral,
self-centred, invulnerable immediacy of youth, for too long afterwards I was
involved in struggling with my own private demons and the trip-wires they had
been busy installing for me in my life.
It’s well
over a decade now since I managed to banish most of those demons, or at least
to cage them so securely that they can no longer urgently threaten my life or
my happiness. In those early days of putting my life back together again I
realised the importance of friends and people who love me, and it became clear
to me that the ordinary rituals of keeping in touch, however fleetingly, are an
important part of nourishing those relationships.
Although I
realised that the sending of Christmas cards is one of these important rituals,
I consciously decided not to take that way. There had been too many caesuras in
my life, too many friends for whom I had no longer addresses, for many of whom
I had no contact details whatsoever. But the realisation of these losses, and
the personal impoverishment they had given rise to, fortunately coincided with
the spread of general digital connectedness at the beginning of the new century.
I had
started to renew contact with many old friends, often using the internet to
find them. And, as more and more people acquired e-mail accounts, I decided,
instead of sending Christmas cards, to commit myself to the new virtual reality
and send a longer personal e-mail to all the friends who could be reached by
means of a web-tag containing that old mercantile symbol - @.
So, for
many years now, I have been writing my Christmas e-mail. But the digital world changes,
changes, changes, and my use of it changes too. In the past decade I have made many
new acquaintances and established a number of what I regard as real friendships
with people whom I have never met in real life. There are people, old friends
and new, people all over the world, with whom most of my regular contacts now take
place through various social networks; facebook, Google+, blogger, wordpress, and
all the other virtual equivalents of the Irish pub, or the 18th Century coffee
house.
Therefore,
my friends, I have decided to move my Christmas mail here this year. And all of
this has been nothing more than my usual rambling, roundabout, long-winded way
of getting around to wishing you all a very happy Christmas.
Over the
past couple of years I have published a number of essays here on Christmas and
I feel no urge to repeat myself – if you really feel like reading them, just
type “Christmas” into the search bar on the right of the page. But there was
just one idea that occurred to me, which I would like to share with you.
In the
Christian version of the much older urge to celebrate mid-winter/new year which
seems instinctive to humanity in the northern hemisphere, the angels sing of “peace
on earth.” There is something deeply quiet, inherently peaceful, about these
shortest days of the year, when nature sleeps and we follow a deep urge to seek
sharing and harmony with those we love. It is, perhaps, this longing for
fellowship, generosity and solidarity which we try to express in the circle of
our loved ones at this time which makes all the violence, injustice and
needless pain which humans are capable of inflicting on each other appear so
particularly horrible and useless. Whether in Newtown,
Connecticut or Aleppo,
Syria, in Timbuktu,
Mali or Bethlehem,
Palestine, the
wrongness and futility of violence, hatred and killing strike us particularly
at this time of year.
This
Christmas, my friends, I wish you and me, us all and the world peace. Peace in
our hearts, in our families, our communities, and our countries. Peace on
earth. A wish as unfulfilled now as it was two thousand years ago. And yet, a
wish still worth wishing. Maybe our wishing it – our really wishing it – is the
only thing which stops us from finally and completely destroying ourselves.
Happy
Christmas. And peace on earth. Salaam. Shalom.
