Colette NiReamonn Ioannidou
THE WAY THINGS ARE
Christmas is a Christian feast celebrating the birth of Christ which, over time, has become a worldwide celebration for anyone to join in. You don’t have to be Christian to put up a pagan tree or decorations, or to give gifts to those you love or respect. It’s most fun when small children are involved, seeing their joy as wrapping paper is pulled off packages and hearing squeals of delight when it’s something they really longed for.
Christmas is a bubble, a physical thing that knowingly sucks a lot of us into its atmosphere of illusion. We do all the things we ought to do as prescribed by tradition or religion, we exhaust ourselves trying to make the feast fun and, often, it becomes the opposite. Tradition at times obliges us to spend time with people we’d rather not be with, straining our actor’s side faking polite ha-ha’s at lame jokes or pretending interest in boring anecdotes we’ve heard from the same people several times before.
This Christmas is unique courtesy of Covid-19, which has wrecked lives and businesses and left a hefty slice of the population very miserable, sad or worse, gravely ill or having lost their lives. People won’t be rushing around shops, those we still have access to, buying gifts, they’ll be lucky to squeeze by in food markets on watch-what-you-spend trips.
The wealthy won’t notice much difference except that the usual money-is-no-object shopping spree in New York or a European capital won’t be as accessible as last year’s was.
I lay in bed one night, thinking of what I would wish for if there was tangible magic in this world, where a wand could be waved and I could make things happen for the better. I might not be able to achieve world peace but I would make Christmas night one of absolute tranquillity and contentment for people who have been hit by personal loss of one sort of another since last Christmas; people I know and care about.
I would call my trouble-free area the State of Bliss. On the outside, it would look like a small, well-built, softly lit log cabin nestled in snow amid pine trees with magnificent deer strolling by. I’d have high mountains etched against a clean blue sky and even a wide, gentle lake with its waters metaled to silver by the chill. The interior, however, like Dr Who’s time travelling telephone box, would be large enough to comfortably accommodate my guests and offer them every possible mental and physical comfort. Once they have passed through the portals, it would be mandatory via the wand, that sadness is left behind.
The echoing hymns, prayers and psalms in churches that focus on Christ’s birth and what it is supposed to offer mankind will not be insulated by crowds of worshippers this year. These places of prayer are at times, so different to the said origins of the Lord to which homage is paid in them: a simple stable in Bethlehem.
The simplicity of the message ‘care for each other’ can also swamped by self-interest or competitiveness. I will be thinking especially of two families this year for whom an emptiness will sit at the table with them and follow most of their actions during the festive season because there is no wand to heal the pain of loss. One can set the mind to getting on with it and staying busy, but things they will remember, things they touch, people they see, the figure in the street that looks so like… yet isn’t will come, unasked for. The love they gave and were given, far more precious than material things, becoming only a memory. The age of the lost loved one will stay the same in photos on the walls as the living age with each Christmas that passes.
Panayiota was a young, hard-working mother of five lively children. Her mother, an old friend, met me one day all in black. I assumed an old one had passed on. Tears spoke as much as her lips when she told me she had lost her daughter to cancer and, bugger Covid-19, we gave each other our usual bearhug that lasted longer than it normally would as I thought of the burden she, with several health problems of her own, faces. For those five children are not her only grandchildren, she has others. ‘How are you managing?’ I asked. On pills was her answer, ‘For now, I have to be strong for the children and it’s their Christmas although the youngest can’t grasp what has happened.’
I will also think of Photini, a tall, beautiful warrior till the end who fought cancer eye-to-eye and gave it such a battle. Her laugh will be missed, so will her wit, her courage and endurance. Then, there’s the young foreign couple near me whose first born had problems and was kept in hospital as they anxiously waited for the all clear. Theirs will be a real celebration of birth as they lovingly hold the child of hope in their arms.
Make Christmas the gift of not giving up the fight for continued life.
