Christmas Public Service Announcement
There is something you need to know: everything is going to be okay. Christmas might be your worst time of year. It might be your best time of year. It might mean nothing at all to you except more Bing Crosby than you thought you could handle and a vomitous amount of Panatone on sale in the last few weeks of December. Either way, everything feels a bit hectic at the moment.
It’s okay to feel the overwhelmitude. It’s okay to wonder why giant baubles lining the streets are necessary or why we need to hear quite so much about Good King Wenceslas. It’s okay to stand in the supermarket snapping “oh COME ON” at the tinsel. But really: everything is going to be okay. Here are some things it’s good to remember during the Christmas period.
It’s good to remember that Christmas carols have really lovely bits in them sometimes like the phrase “deep and crisp and even” or just that bit where the kids all yell “Hey!” in Jingle Bells.
It’s good to remember that art galleries are free and quiet.
It’s good to remember that any one of the people you’re rushing past could be your next new friend, talking and laughing in a place you haven’t been yet.
There is nothing so pure as the attention focused on a busker by a child under the age of five.
Second hand bookshops smell nice.
Ice is water that you can tinkle in a way that makes you feel a bit posh.
Cheese exists.
The word ‘lugubrious’ is lovely. A slow, beautiful sound that takes its time to describe the way sorrow expresses itself through the human face. Perfect.
Two people can play chess without speaking the same language and still know intimately how each other’s minds work.
Sometimes the clouds look like the sea.
Some people are truly awful but those people have to deal with being awful and it’s probably easier to just know that sometimes you’re accidentally rude to your family on the phone and one time you laughed at a kid who got dacked at music camp and you always wonder what happened to him.
There is no sound quite so exciting as the squealing, splashing, whistle-blowing hubbub of the Australian public swimming pool over summer.
There’s a couple, a young man and a young woman, who are probably not a couple at all but who work in a cinema near where I live – it’s dark in there of course and they wear black clothes and look completely exhausted. They have a half hour lunch together in which they sit in the sun slumped against a wall on the footpath and talk sideways at each other. They laugh lazily and chat and sometimes they sit in silence with their eyes closed. I went past them the other day and he was reading to her from a science fiction book while she listened, hunched forward drawing circles on the concrete with a twig. They probably didn’t know each other six months ago. Things like that are happening all the time.
Caterpillars turn into butterflies. FOR REAL! THAT ACTUALLY HAPPENS!
In nature, paths form. That’s amazing, when you think about it, because it means a bunch of people, or wallabies, or echidnas or whatever have to go the same way without talking about it beforehand. And aren’t paths lovely and welcoming and comforting – do we think that because we’re biologically programmed to? Do wallabies think that too?
Most people are good at something. Lovely handwriting. Being nice to animals. Drying the dishes. Keeping secrets. Everyone’s better than you are at something and you’re better at something than they are. This is why society works and also why arguments start when more than one person is required to set up Ikea furniture.
Whoever you are, wherever you are, we all look up at the same moon each night.
Sometimes, and this can happen at any time, toast is the answer. That’s just a fact.
So be kind to yourself over the next little while. The metaphor of the new year will be along any minute to trick us into thinking we can turn over a new leaf and greet the future as people who won’t overschedule or run late or say the wrong thing or forget to put the bins out. Meanwhile, embrace the imperfect. Enjoy the quiet moments and revel in the fact that the tinsel will be replaced by hot crossed buns in no time.
A version of this article appeared in The Big Issue. Please support The Big Issue. They're the good guys.