Christmas reflections
As the Christmas spirit fades away and Michael Bublé is packed back in the freezer, I thought I’d take a moment to write down a few reflections that popped into my head during the festive season.
Celebrate this way
The more Christmas’ I celebrate, the more I see a sort of pattern emerging. Most of the advertisements we see are targeting a specific style of how we should celebrate Christmas. That’s fair enough, after all, Christmas has been a major cultural tradition for a good while now. What gets me is how fabricated it has become. Let me explain.
Most advertisments show images of supposedly happy families sitting around a table following a pre-planned routine. It seems all fun and games until you realise the whole purpose of it is to persuade you to buy the products they’re consuming. Not many people would question the absurdity of this apparently simple message but it goes without saying that this has become the norm that we expect on a yearly basis. I can’t help but ask:
Why do we completely ignore that maybe we’re being pushed to celebrate Christmas in a certain way?
This leads me onto my next point.
Enjoy “your” Christmas
I can’t help but feel that Christmas is becoming a sort of personal occasion. Well, maybe not personal in the sense of celebrating it on your own, but in the sense of making sure that “your” Christmas is the best, whether that be with family, friends, or even alone.
As I touched on before, we’re constantly being bombarded with images of how the perfect Christmas should look and how we can make this our own. It seems we’re being sold this idea of how our Christmas should look. So we listen to these messages and begin to focus all our energy on making our Christmas reach the standards set by the advertisements.
I feel this falsely empowers us into believing we have some sort of ownership over Christmas. The simple message, “Make your Christmas special with …(insert any product here)”, gives the illusion of choice, when in reality, it’s just a tool designed to steer us towards ultimately buying and consuming the given product.
With everyone out there trying their best to mark the occasion, it feel we end up blinding ourselves by listening to these personalised messages. We can become so fixated on making it special for ourselves that we lose touch with the true value of this time of year.
The best gift
In the wake of another Christmas, I realised the most important thing. It’s not about spending money on making your Christmas look and feel a certain way by filling the void with cheap throwaway plastic presents. The true joy can’t be bought with money; it’s found in spending time with loved ones.
You might say, “yeah whatever, sure I’ve heard that one like a thousand times.”, but actions speak louder than words, and by looking around at all the people hurrying from one shop to the next, with their hands filled with bags from many different shops, it’s clear where they’re spending their Christmas.
I’m not saying those that give gifts are celebrating it all wrong, quite the opposite. A gift is a beautiful way to show appreciation towards someone. What I’m saying is, once the Christmas fog has cleared and we move into the cold winter months, I’ve realised the best gift you can give doesn’t have a price tag. It can’t be purchased in any shop, online or in-store. The best gift you can give is your time–but not only that, because time is only valuable when we allocate our attention to it. So really, the best gift you can give someone is your presence.
Spend it wisely though, because this gift can’t be returned.
Conclusion
Christmas is a wonderful time of year that brings together communities and families. It goes without saying that it’ll be around for a while. I hope my reflections inspire you consider how you spent your time during this Christmas and whether that gift you bought your mum from Dunnes measures up to the true gift of presence.
Le grá.