It's hard to get excited about Christmas when words like "chestnuts roasting on an open fire" make me want to sweat more. It is early December to Makassar and we are warding off again rainy season until he can start a day. Moisture refuse to let my smalls while dry heat saps moisture from me. I'm a mummy wraps soaked lurching in the mall home to face plastic pine regiments surrounded by an entourage of other various decorations in plastic.
According to the season, my heart goes out to others: poor cashiers, victims of a demand management meeting, they feature the music of wood, not quite there Santa hats Christmas and flashing Rudolph nose. A portly young girl did a double take and promises to be a crier, "He looks like a monkey!" His cruel laughter continues in the supermarket aisle.
Meanwhile, on street corners outside, gossips stand skeleton propped on sticks with begging bowls, some hope that the season will loosen the strings scholarship, most unaware of the hype. constipated clouds gather over, promising month and drear before the end of their livelihoods. And I'm supposed to watch an irresistibly cheerful fat man in a combination of red hot survival and feel gay?
Humbug. But as I sit here struggling to find a significant point, I'm being visited ...
I loaded memories of Christmas past. The air was thick with excitement, school plays, Christmas calendars in the days when they should not be stuffed with cheap chocolate to be rewarding, this increasingly under the tree like watching period in geology time, making the Christmas pudding with mom sozzled everything about the ingredients, the opulent food. And of course, I remember the Millennium Falcon and the model scale 1:24 Lancaster Bomber - best gift ever! And I remember the gel adventure dressed in the same day, I always gave me the Christmas shop with all the money I had (not because I am generous, just hated work).
And then there was this pause summer school, I worked on a farm in Sussex, now curiously real legions of commercial Christmas trees, while helping renovating a 13th century mansion. Those that I worked for and with were not nonsense, old silver seeding. I remember old Mike Pike conferring on me how the winters were spent in the past; how Christmas perpetuates pagan ways when the carriage stopped in the mud and the solstice called for an exhausting celebration to break the monotony and encourage people on the spring; to increase the joy in the face of inevitable breeding, production and family succumb to the elements. Gratitude warms me when I consider the ease that I got it. I back in the present. It is not enough just how I can or want to give the "surplus population" of Scrooge, it is the crude reality of privileged young I teach. They just do not.
church meticulous spectators can not explain what Christmas is historically and spiritually fit. And when asked what their worst Bugaboos about Christmas are, they have nothing to say. And when asked what they like, they still have nothing. Something different is eaten, because it is expected. Their houses are adorned with plastic stuff that permeates them with a sense of anticipation, they can not explain. They eat to the point that sends some on the edge of diabetes and they get a little more spoiled than usual; unpacking an i-Phone or new game box before disappearing into their rooms until the new year. The world goes beyond unnoticed. Gratitude warms me when I consider the ease that I have.
The future concerns me. Against the tide of rampant commercialism, defect, Black Friday hysteria and peer pressure to perform, my family always has its humble roots in kampung . This means that my oldest daughter is happy with the gift wrapped chocolate (although we could push the boat out a little further this year), my youngest get a rattle and my wife get up t-shirts; all suitable to my frugal kind. But how it describes in this? Is, in the end, my tomb be visited by those wishing to urinate and laugh? Gratitude warms me when I ... uh.
My humorous observation is almost what 'Merry Christmas business has become serious in the largest Muslim country in the world. Personally, I'll take my queue from the 13th century. My family and friends will come to a house in the mountains where there will be a bathroom with hot water and a fireplace (not that the hope of that), roast chicken gravy and sausage wrapped in bacon , various vegetables and bread, imported alcoholic beverages, ad hoc decorations and gifts simple. We will have a good royal and dispel the darkness inevitable moment of bleak months ahead; not only rain, but the time of our time :. aircraft shot down, natural disasters and violent madness in the world
In truth, recognition warms me when, for a few days a year, we can get together, celebrate and enjoy who and what we have now, and the future can wait until Panadol and liver salts have run their course. And why not? We will all keep Christmas in our own way and God bless each of us.
And my own personal observation is amusing in the way out of my element, I'm sounding so saccharine. I can feel my teeth rotting, but somehow Christmas requires.
Have a good Chrim.