SOLD: Beautiful Happyzine

Joyce Elwood-Smith

I hope you are ready for this wonderful season. I don’t mean ready in the sense that you have all your Christmas shopping done and all the presents wrapped, or that you have baked and iced your Christmas cake, and made all the goodies our mothers would have felt necessary to make Christmas perfect, as of course it was.

I mean are you ready for the season of joy and cheer, and jolly old fashioned good heartedness? No bah humbugs.   I know it is a stressful time of year, what with school plays, prize giving, endless end of year functions and parties, and so many ‘bills’ to pay, and it’s hot … and everyone is getting tired; but hey stop … wait a minute, it is summer!

The sun is out, holidays are nearly here and life is good. Our country is the most beautiful country in the world to spend Christmas. We have choices, barbecue under the Pohutakawa trees or barbecue under the sun umbrella. Life is all about choices. We can spend a lot of time preparing gifts and goodies, and spend lots of money doing it, if that’s our “thing”, but we don’t have to, we can set our own traditions.

Why not a special ‘brunch’ with our favourite foods, or just settle for a casual ‘barbie’ and salads? Adult gifts need not be exchanged, and let’s face it most children these days only want one thing, something electronic and maybe a few treats in their stocking. If you really want to stop the culture of expensive present expectation there is always something relative to the holidays, like snorkels and flippers or a cute beach towel. If the children are expecting more we have only ourselves to blame.

We need to forget the  television ads and keep away from the shops. We don’t need to be under the illusion that everything must be perfect. Why not allow ourselves some breathing space and remember what the season is. 

I went to an evening with Charles Dickens (or his ghost) who gave us a delightful hour of pure Dickens as we were read ‘A Christmas Carol’. The one actor played all the parts, the ghosts stand out in my mind as being most impressive. In the tale, Ebenezer Scrooge discovers he has choices. The relevant ghosts take him back in time, to a Christmas past, and then to the present Christmas when he is taken (unseen) to the humble home of the Cratchits and shown just how tough it is for poor struggling families. Shocked as he is at seeing their poverty, he is surprised at their joyfulness. He discovers that their joy is not dependent on circumstance or things. He then is given a vision of a future Christmas that is very black and gloomy, seeing himself as other people see him. For the first time in his life, Scrooge realises just how mean-spirited and miserable he is; and how unhappy he has made everybody. He vows to change his ways, not just by being kinder to his employees, but by being cheerful and good hearted.

The term today would be to ‘show the love’.

Here in the southern hemisphere a strip of artificial holly, with fake snow or tinsel, is likely to be seen tied around a barbecue, or on a fence separating sand and sea from a caravan or tent. The Christmas barbecue cook, dressed in shorts and jandals, will be wearing a red hat, trimmed with white. Christmas trees are often decorated with snowflakes and icicles and topped with an angel or star. The jolly man in red and white makes his appearance in air-conditioned shopping malls, are all somehow inexorably mixed up in a marvellous ‘plum duff’ of traditional sentiment, memories of Christmas’s past, and the events in Bethlehem, two thousand and thirteen years ago.

From a child’s point of view it is exciting and perplexing. When I was small, I loved Christmas cards with red breasted robins, children skating on a pond, and pretty village churches sparkling with snow. I imagined Christmas in the northern hemisphere, must be so much better.

But we who grew up ‘down under’, on the opposite side of the world to all that snow, know Christmas is summer and summer starts with Christmas!

Tags: Christmas, grandmother