Lost Christmas
During our writing workshop this week, Deena pointed to an innate need for magic that we have as humans. This is why we invent fables, fairytales, sometimes based on truths, sometimes completely invented. One of those big fables is the Christmas story, and over the years we have created an entire season around it. Christmas, a season of wonder and surprises, of magic. Lights glistening in windows and on trees, shiny ornaments, real candles or fairylights, which even have magic in their name.
The excitement around giving and receiving presents. I know that some people hate this, but I love it, always have. Picking something out for a person, trying to predict what they’d like, and getting to know them better in the process, and by their reaction. I love the wrapping and decorating, making of cards or whole presents, all the shiny things. I love receiving gifts too. Gifts that someone put thought into, nicely packaged, shiny, or wrapped in newspaper, and a handwritten card, that’s important.
Christmas used to bring up those big wishes, for a tight knit group of friends, celebrating together, of hosting and cooking a big dinner and decorating the house beautifully, of long walks in the snow, and togetherness, evenings filled with stories and music.
Hopes, wishes, dreams. They all overlap and they’re heightened during this time, and often I was faced with a very contrasting reality, aloneness, family conflict, and no place of my own.
In past years I’ve celebrated many strange and underwhelming Christmasses, always speckled with little moments of beauty, but overlaid with an air of lack and longing.
The distance between reality and dream a big crevasse, a canyon of grand proportions.
Films and books told different stories, stories of fun, of happiness, of family chaos and reunion, of small and big magicks.
I used to read and read to feed my dreams, nourish them to one day sprout little shoots into my reality, watching corny Christmas movies, buying children’s books with colourful illustrations.
And perhaps something in me gave up. The discrepancy of the real and the dream too painful. I think that’s what it is. The pain became too great, or too drawn-out, over the years and years. Maybe that’s what jaded means. A pain drawn out so long that something inside snaps, very quietly, it just goes, and suddenly the magic’s gone, the dream is gone, and one is left in a reality without a spark. No more horizon. Withdrawal from life, depression.
All those movies seem corny and empty like a shell now, like a song played too often on the radio losing any essence. The old things don’t work anymore, don’t inspire, don’t cheer.
I’ve tried strategies from acceptance to walking out into life, letting reality hit me, so maybe some small sparkly moment will appear. New spaces, new activities. Something unaffected by that jadedness.
I guess patience is key, and to invite the dead season. A season where things feel hollow and worn out. Maybe something is dying that will make space for a new passion, idea, obsession, love. Dying as beauty.
So I lost Christmas, my dream of it, my joy & excitement of the season.
Feeling the destructive power of capitalism and the state of the world with horrendous worse-than-wars and the complicity of Western governments and the disregard for the earth as much as human life.
It’s all heavy. Too heavy for the hollow to hold it.
Something new must be born, something stronger.
It seems strange to celebrate now, though I know that celebration of life, and joy are fundamental, important, necessary. Maybe we need to find new ways to do this, letting the hollow fall away, looking at each other and the season and ourselves afresh, breaking old modes, turning off the auto pilot and aggressively cheery carols while focussing on the core values that this season is advertised to stand for: connection, togetherness, empathy.
Maybe asking someone how they’re truly doing is more important than the Christmas mood, maybe really listening is more important than the look of things.
Ironically this is extra hard during Christmas; families, old patterns. But little moments of attention, little moments of realness, perhaps that breaks the spell of the illusion of how it’s all meant to look like and feel like.
Maybe celebrating more honestly helps us live more honestly, less focussed on how things appear and more on what is true and important, and maybe that will bring some of the magic back into this world.
// Siris