THIS IS MY CHRISTMAS: Brett Rainey

What Christmas means to me? I was thinking about this the other day and surprisingly, there really wasn’t that much to put in it. It was the usual stuff you see on Christmas cards about everybody being in a good mood, enjoying the snow, comfort food etc., but there wasn’t really anything of proper substance that jumped straight into my mind. I don’t suppose I could even use the reply of the Christmas story, seeing as how my Christmas seems to be more and more centred on the Xmas shopping; capitalism gone mad, or Christmas becoming more of a secular holiday, or even both, I wouldn’t like to say.

However, what I did realise was that those things I initially dismissed as fluff to keep the warm-hearted happy were, in fact, very important things. They’re things that at any other time of the year would be the best things in my life; maybe not the food but, as most people who know me could tell you, it would still be pretty high up on my list.

After a little pondering (which, by the way, is a massively underrated word), It clicked with me that this dismissal was because at Christmas, that’s exactly how these things are presented. All those good things like family and friends, and giving and receiving presents, are the times when you can forget about all the bad stuff happening and just kick back and have fun. The way they have been sold to us though, as things from ‘the good old days’ means we automatically dismiss them as nostalgic bumbling, instead of recognizing that the reason they are still there is because we still want them. I do not know any one person alive now or in the history of the species that has not needed relationships with other people. We pretend that we are above it, that we’re far too metropolitan and sophisticated for things like pulling crackers, but we do it anyway, because we secretly just want those special moments with people we love.

So, to me that is Christmas - it’s about how we increasingly just try to ignore our human nature and be the super-cool suburbanites we see on TV, but really we just want a good hug and an awful sweater.