Christmas Special

Christmas is something different each year. I guess for me this year it is three things.

As every year, this ad started popping up on the tv in November:

"There are some things money can't buy... For everything you need for Christmas: Mastercard"

I'm afraid not. Which brings us to the first aspect of Christmas 2005, of which I'm kindly remembered by Dana through the loudspeakers: "It's gonna be a cold, cold Christmas without you/Dreaming of those warm, warm lazy summer days/It's gonna be a long and lonely Christmas without you/Missing you my darling in oh so many ways" et cetera (Greenaway and Stephens 1975).

Then there's regular Christmas melancholy, caused by the friction between the annual reiteration of the same Christmas rituals, and the change of our lives over time. Last year, Carroll's opening poem to Through the looking-glass voiced the feeling. This year, I found it in Mr Pickwick's Christmas by Charles Dickens (1836; chapter 28):

Many of the hearts that throbbed so gaily then [i.e. in the Christmas gatherings of
our earlier years], have ceased to beat; ... the hands we grasped, have grown
cold; the eyes we sought, have hid their lustre in the grave; and yet the old
house, the room, the merry voices and smiling faces, the jest, the laugh, the
most minute and trivial circumstance connected with those happy meetings, crowd upon our mind at each recurrence of the season, as if the last assemblage had
been but yesterday. Happy, happy Christmas that can win us back to the delusions
of our childish days ...

As Michael Slater explains, painful memories are "actually integral to the joys of Christmas".

But before you think my Christmas is 'all sorrow' ;-) the third aspect of my Christmas very simply and very merrily is family (and that is something special after three months), lights, warmth, music, food, games... And stories! So don't forget to listen to the remaining Penguin podcasts of A Christmas Carol.

I wish the whole world a merry Christmas (being in a generous mood...), but you in particular:

"May your days be merry and bright
and may all your Christmases ..."