We're a couple of days away from the Solstice and so all the classic Christmas songs are on repeat on the airways and in the brain fog. The least likely ones will always make me smile – Fairytale of New York; Stop the Cavalry; , Driving Home for Christmas, I Believe in Father Christmas – the obvious ones will get me bopping Wish it could be Christmas Every Day; Step into Christmas; Merry Xmas Everybody; - what can I say? I'm a child of the Seventies!
I can't hear these songs without seeing my parents' living room, over-decorated for the season, remembering going to school disco's with tinsel round my hat, squeezing in Christmas lunch between Top of the Pops and the Queen. Throwing snowballs – ok, slush-balls most years!
Not every Christmas was brilliant and shiny and happy; some were marked by family bereavements or relationship struggles; others by the ordinary tensions causing tempers to fray; yet others by sickness and lack of interest. Mostly though, mostly they were fairy-lit –full of parties, romance, silliness, belief in magic, shared tv-watching, late nights telling the old stories, all of the old jokes being repeated, board games and word puzzles, friendship and family, music and laughter and dancing. Mostly they were overwhelmingly full of love.
So many of the people around me these days are explaining that they find Christmas a chore, an irritation, that they cannot be bothered with decorating the house, that they are not sending cards (for whatever self-justifying reason they wish to attach to that, rather than just admitting they don't want to send cards).
I find all of that very sad. I think I know where it comes from. It comes from the over-consumerisation of the mid-winter festival. It comes from the way all that love and silliness and joy got corrupted into competitive decorating and over-spending, over-eating, over-indulging on the worst of who we are. And if the only way folk can find to pull away from "over-doing" the festivities is to not do them at all, part of me wants to applaud them for it, for it being a better choice.
However, the bigger part of me is a Seventies Dancing Queen, a Sixties Snow Baby, a hippy romantic, a believer in magic. The bigger and better part of me is a child. And come the winter festival she comes out to play and will not allow dreary weather, or the stinker of a cold, or the bah-humbuggers, to stop her having fun.
If I was ever a Christian, I moved away from that faith a very long time ago, but I don't find that any barrier to enjoying a festival that pre-dates Christianity by un-measured time. I will sing carols. I will share the message of peace and goodwill. I will look to the stars.
I mark the turning of the year, which in the northern hemisphere, my home, is the turning from the dark back towards the light. I mark the midwinter, the feasting that is possible because of the work during the growing and harvesting times and that is possible because these are the days of less work, the days of rest and recovery.
Let us not mistake "indulgence" for "over-indulgence". Indulging in the fruits of our labours, enjoying the yield, enjoying each other, the presence of the good people in our lives, the achievements of the year, taking time to rest, to story-tell, to sing, to dance. These are important things.
These are the things that we work and strive for. If we do not take the time to hold them close to us, to revel in them, to celebrate… then what is the work all about? Mere survival.
And if mere survival isn't enough of a reason to celebrate, then maybe there we also miss a trick.
Culturally, for me, the celebrations are tied into traditions: the decorating of a tree, the soft-lights of candles and lamps, the long dark evenings, the hoping for snow (or at least frost). I find romance in the way streetlights and building lights reflect in lakes and rivers. I am delighted by mist rising off the lake. I am awed by the colours of fresh-cut timber lying wet on the forest path. I am charmed by church bells and the cathedral spire lost in the fog.
There's that line at the end of the Greg Lake / Peter Sinfield song - The Christmas we get we deserve – a bit harsh for many I feel, for those who are struggling with life on the street, or with sickness, or whatever other traumas shape their reality – but for many of the rest of us, yes. We can and do choose our experience of this time of year.
Family Christmases are a thing of the past for me, but the memory of them is a joy in the present. Coupled-up Christmases likewise came and went. The last few years have been an exploration of how to do solitude mid-winters. And, yes, I have my sad moments but this much I have found…
I love a room decorated for the season. I love the tinsel and the glitter and the candles and the fairy lights. There is something olde worlde about it, something mediaeval or more ancient. Something simple. There is an honouring of the darkness of midwinter, the rest-time, the dream-time.
I love that the days of drear weather are short days, and I can walk in the murk and the mists and the damp, and then retreat into the warm. I love long evenings that are an excuse to read books and watch movies.
I love sending and receiving cards. I accept that this tradition got beyond the sense of itself, when it became a thing of the most expensive cards, the prettiest, or the daftest, or the most sent or received, or the use of such a greeting as a marketing tool. And I know many people simply stopped because writing them was a chore, and getting them meant nothing to them. That's ok.
I don't mind not getting a card from anyone at all, but I am personally irritated when people tell me they are giving money to charity instead… NO! This isn't an either / or decision. Give your money to charity or do not. Send cards or do not. Don't pretend to tie the two things together, or I may want to see the spreadsheet in which you have worked out exactly how many cards you are not sending and what it would have cost and the evidence that that precise amount of money has gone to wherever you've told me it is going.
Nah, I'm not that sad. I just don't want to hear it. Send me a card or do not. Put your coppers in the relevant collecting tin or do not. The spirit of Christmas, the spirit of the solstice is peace and love and celebrating and giving. Do what you are called to do.
I give to charities at this time of year that I do not support at other times. I give extra to the ones I do support, sometimes, not always. I throw more money at the buskers, because I think they're working harder to earn it on the cold wet streets. AND I send cards. The number is diminishing year on year, because my family is shrinking, and my social circle likewise.
On the other hand, that means that I now get to make most of the cards I send. That will become more of a thing – and I freely admit that it is because the doing of it brings me joy. Writing the cards is a way of holding a little space for each person, to genuinely think about them and wish them well in the year to come. For some, it may be the only time in the year when I do that – and I know that may be equally true of one or two of those I receive, but I still think that is "a good thing".
I love walking the streets after dark to share in the joy of other people's decorations. The very fact that we can still conjure up that childlike-approach gives me hope.
As I'm moving into my 'other way of living' I'm creating a different approach to present-giving. I no longer give other than where I feel called to do so. And what I give becomes ever more simple. The revelation for me has been that in doing that, it has also become ever more personal. I've started to gather gifts for the people who matter to me during the year, as I stumble across them. Some are given then and there, others are hoarded for mid-winter, for birthdays, for anniversaries. This too feels like a step back in time, to a time when life was less "instant", when gifts would take time to gather, to craft, to make, when in putting in the time, we were putting in the energy, the love, the magic that made a gift more than just a token given thing.
I find I'm also giving more freely in the sense of not minding whether they choose to keep and use the gift, or to gift it on, or turn it into something else. The love is in the exchange. The journey takes that love with it.
As we head towards the solstice, I have no idea how I am going to be marking the turning of the year, this year. I should have been dancing last night, but sadly Mary had to cancel due to Covid developments locally. For the same reason the Spiral Dance that would have taken me into 2022 has also been called off. There is sadness in that. But I will dance anyway. To tunes on the radio. To my old CDs. To music in the streets if it catches my mood.
I know there will be walking. I hope there will be beaches. I know there will be good food. And laughter. I have already met up with friends and family and shared a great deal of that. I don't need to tie my mid-winter feasting to a date on the calendar. I have celebrated the turning of my personal year with a good friend, and that of a new friend with her & with my dear cousin. Writer friends have things lined up. My wild spaces call to me. And my soul mates are always there waiting in the wings.
Whatever you're doing over the next week, sprinkle it with fairy dust. Believe in the magic!
If we want peace on earth, we have to create it – and I choose to believe we start doing that by believing in magic, by finding our joy and indulging our inner child. Go on, I dare you: have a peaceful solstice, a joyful yuletide and start thinking about your very own happy new year.
Go gently, go in peace.
