This week’s column in The Kerryman newspaper.
Michael Commane
I overheard a young woman at a rail station on Monday morning talking to someone on the phone, she seemed to be worried about what she was going to buy her sister for Christmas. And then went on telling her that she had most of her presents bought but was still worried about a pullover she was buying for someone. The poor woman was in a state and looked almost distraught.
I shouldn’t have been eavesdropping. I have to admit it was an interesting spectacle and a fabulous distraction on an early morning in December on the way to work.
The Christmas madness turns our roads into car parks. It’s akin to sardine-land on trams, trains and buses with people loaded down with Christmas ware.
Am I being Scrooge before he saw the light? Maybe.
As a child I loved Christmas; I remember the toys I played with when I must have been only five or six; the bus I pushed along the floor, which had real battery operated lights.
Even in later years Christmas could be great fun, but with both my parents dead, not being married and having no children, there’s something about it which makes me feel an outsider and maybe that’s why I look on at some of the frenetic activity, scratch my head and wonder what’s it all about.
You hear people say it’s for children, and in fear of being excoriated, only yesterday I heard someone say it was ‘a woman’s thing’. Not my words, rather those of ‘an enlightened man’ or at least, so he considers himself.
The very word Christmas seems to set us into a frenzy. And business knows all the right buttons to press to relieve us of our money. It’s a bonanza time for the sellers and hawkers; they know every trick in the book on how to seduce us to empty our pockets.
And then the day after it’s over the sales begin. It’s a never ending hamster-like wheel that never stops turning, with it reaching a crescendo on Christmas Day.
Might it be that the feast of Christmas has been hijacked?
Our emotions sure are strange things; they can play havoc with us. Christmas is a time when we are all swallowed up by emotional fervour, maybe even fever. There are great aspects to it; it’s paradise for children. It can make for wonderful downtime for families and friends but it can also be a time of loneliness, violence and brutality.
What we are celebrating is the birth of Jesus Christ, the man Christians believe is the Son of God. And to get your head around that is as difficult as understanding the frenzy it causes in all of us. Pope
Leo on Saturday emphasised the importance of peace in the story of Christmas.
It might do us no harm to take some time out, relax in the now, even think of what it means to say there is a God, what it means to say Jesus Christ is God. Christmas is a great sign of hope.
I wish you all a blessed and peaceful Christmas.
Thank you for being a reader. It’s a privilege to have this space every week in this great newspaper.
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