Christmas has passed, but it remains. The rest is in hugs and gifts, shared meals and relaxed conversations, joyful children and emotional Christmas songs. For many, in symbols, touching ceremonies, in lights and noise. The common denominator: dating and bringing joy. Some make a huge effort to try to direct it to what they consider essential, their religious heart and the message about God who is born in our lives, is poor, in need, exposed to danger and must flee to avoid being killed. Just as it is happening to many families in our country and with increasing anxiety in war zones and general poverty.

Santa is watching…

Now that its aroma has remained in us, the feelings of joy, love and tenderness, pain in the face of suffering and injustice in all its forms, in the face of hunger, corruption, torture, violent deaths, become even more unbearable. We want to escape from it, not see it, forget it. And yet it is still there, digging its claws into people’s simple lives.

In the era of plastic flowers, the mountains of things pretending to be what they are not, from trees to tiles, through an endless series of articles that try to convince us of the reality of which they are an artificial copy, the authenticity of the feelings that the Christmas celebration produces and manifests takes root like a light that illuminates our personal and collective darkness.

And the question arises: can Christmas and what it represents – even beyond its religious connotation – sincere joy and the desire to please others, to honor them and to know that we love them and that they are present, not be extended to all mankind?? Having a creative and heartfelt break that stops conflicts and wars and takes some time to admire and try to make those close to us happy.

Christmas and culture

Without representing any utilitarian value to us or without a relation of survival in which our life is at stake. An exercise in free and heartfelt affection.

World celebrations of days of peace, non-violence, do not work. They don’t really affect everyday life. On the other hand, they affect Christmas and Valentine’s Day, which involve emotion in the celebration, an aspect so forgotten in mass expressions at a time when mental health is a global and national epidemic.

Christmas doesn’t exist for half the planet.

Is there anything we could do to awaken that leads us collectively and individually to think of others with love and admiration, with a desire to thank them, caress them and be with them? A kind of global secular Christmas, a general truce like the Olympics in Greece, but for everyone. A day to give thanks and hug each other from the heart everywhere at the same time. Meeting day and a gift. It takes aspects of each culture and makes it fun to think about others.

Darkness is defeated by light, hatred by love, injustice by justice. And this must be learned and practiced in order for fear, greed and the desire for power to be transformed by the emergence of a collective consciousness that attracts us all like a magnet. (OR)