It’s easy to dislike Christmas when you were born a cynical old man. As a child, as if in training to become a columnist, I hated everything.
I remember the first family trip to a game park. I’m four. My brown-checkered shirt is buttoned all the way to the top. My hair neatly parted in the least fashionable place.
Then, the giraffe. My first real, live giraffe. My parents look for the kind of reaction parents live to see.
”Not tall enough,” I said.
I had brought along this book about giraffes for reference. ”There,” I said, jabbing a finger at the cartoon giraffe so tall his head popped out above the clouds. ”That’s tall.”
Even today I prefer animals in captivity. They’re more impressive in confined spaces. I want to see a giraffe in a room with a low ceiling and a chandelier.
Still, that much cynicism is hard to sustain. And as I get older I’m learning … One, you can’t eat baked goods every day without developing your own muffin top. And two, there’s a lot to love in the world. Among those things: Christmas.
I love all of it. Really. Queues, carols, custard. Especially the custard. Good, solid pagan fun. Mostly, I love it as a triumph of materialism.
Materialism has a bad reputation. Yet everybody believes in it. We ”teach a man to fish” not because it’s good for his soul but because not having fish is bad for his body. Which, in turn, is bad for his soul.
At the end of A Christmas Carol, it isn’t enough for Scrooge to have a change of heart. It’s that bloody big turkey he sends the Cratchits that makes it alright. Gandhi had bad things to say about materialism but what he was most concerned with was the material circumstances of his followers.
Those people talking about ”sustainable growth”? Isn’t that really ”sustainable materialism”? They’re figuring out how more of us can have what we want and never run out.
Poverty reduction. Economic growth strategies. The healthcare system. All these are institutions of materialism.
Try giving a street-corner beggar a kind word instead of a couple of silver coins. It’s the coins that do the trick.
I visited India a while back. South Africans who’d been there before had told me how the poor — the many, many poor, the disgustingly poor, the poorer-than-our-poor poor — bear their circumstances with such (and this is the word they always use) ”grace”. You know, unlike South Africa’s poor who just don’t know their place.
Didn’t see it. Just not true. This ”grace” people speak about must be the convenient delusion of the rich because everywhere, the poor look desperate. Except where they’re so broken they cease to be anything but the walking dead.
Christmas makes it hard to deny what we’re about. It’s The Stuff that makes us happy. It’s not having The Stuff that makes us sad. As for good books …
Whether they’re about giraffes so tall their heads pop out above the clouds, or they’re promising a party in the afterlife, it’s easy to get lost in the fantasies. Materialism, on the other hand, suggests that the matter matters.
So, Merry Christmas. And custard for everyone.
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