Reality

 

It has long been a concern and an irritation that Christmas arrives before November is finished! Possibly my main reason for being annoyed at the decorations, trees, advertisements and carols appearing so early is that it does not allow the deeper (and often more difficult and darker) themes of Advent to be explored. This is something I have said before, said often and in the saying have irritated many folks.

 

In passing, I perhaps should note that I feel a little different this year as the restrictions under which we are having to live due to this pandemic are making me feel that any fairy light I see and every Christmas song I hear is more likely to evoke a smile instead of a snarl! But don’t worry… I am fairly confident that by next year normal service will have resumed!

 

But I am also hopeful that this year’s very strange and difficult circumstances might bring about another inevitable change, and one that I would welcome.

 

I would hope that the many people who dread the ‘festive season’ with its demands, might feel less pressured this year. For we are all facing a very odd and (in many respects) unwelcome Christmas, and so perhaps we will not be demanding that everyone ‘enjoys themselves’ or adopts the outward 'enforced jollity’ that is so often required of us by others.

 

Parties will be cancelled, dinners will be small, gatherings will be limited, carol services will be physically distanced and silent, hugs will be few and kisses under the mistletoe will be banned. And I can imagine that there are many folks (the recently bereaved, the financially strapped, the emotionally fragile, those with mental health challenges, and those with relationship strains - to name but some) who will be a little relieved at not being forced to ‘put on a happy face’.

 

For me, part of the irritating irony of Christmas too soon invading Advent is that so many of the themes of this season deal with these very issues of loss and longing, of wondering and waiting, of darkness and difficulty and so on. But how little of this we get to hear above the continued blare of ‘Santa Claus is coming to town’.

 

So perhaps this year it will be different. And perhaps this year we will be able to be a little more sensitive to those who cannot so easily adopt the jollity normally demanded. And perhaps this year we will discover anew that the joy, peace and hope of which Christmas speaks is not always the same as the jollity and festivity which usually prevails.

 

For many there is a different reality, and maybe this year we will have the space and the context in which to see that.