The arrival of November turns me into a grinchy bah-humbugger of epidemic proportions. It’s odd that a normally easy going, happy go lucky bloke like me, does a complete 180 and all because of the imminent arrival of Christmas.
To be fair (to myself), by mid-November, we’re already hearing those pathetic Christmas songs on tinny speaker systems in shopping malls, and it goes steadily downhill from that moment on. The traffic builds up on a daily basis as people who don’t take their cars out during the year suddenly start doing so and dither all over the roads, totally oblivious to the chaos they’re creating. Simple tasks become day trips and you can almost see the generic national blood pressure start to rise.
Joking aside, it’s also a time of year when police have to deal with the highest levels of domestic violence and when many average families are put under substantial pressure to provide what in many cases, they can’t afford to provide. Christmas is for some, a time of celebration and happiness. But we’d do well to consider that at the other end of the scale, it is also the time for some to completely delaminate into tragedy.
We all tend to judge our world from our own experiences of it and in all honesty, I can’t say I’ve ever had a “terrible” Christmas. My family was anything but rich, but with careful management, my folks managed to make it a memorable and happy time each year. There was always food on the table and friends visited and there was much catching up done by the adults while the children played with their new (usually very low budget) toys. We managed with what we had and were happy with what we got.
Those were the days before mass media and clever marketing turned it into what has for many become an envy fest and a time to be reminded of just how little some of us can do at this time of year.
Christmas is a bit of a potpourri of ancient pagan rituals, knitted together in more recent times to provide a commercial bonanza for retailers all over the world.
While I can appreciate the joy Christmas brings to children, I can also appreciate only too well, the misery it brings for many others. So my bah-humbuggery is not just about how much it personally annoys me that the roads are busy and that chaos is unleashed upon us, but it’s also a time when I reflect on how tough it is for those less fortunate among us. For them, it really is a tough time and like me, they’ll be very pleased it’s over for another year albeit for a completely different reason.
Just a thought – Is a beneficiary Christmas bonus a possibility around August this year?