The Spirit of Christmas
Life in General|I want to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I also want to say whatever your religion, creed, sexuality, age, height, weight, eye colour…or anything else that someone could use to single you out, spare a thought for a moment for the things you have to be thankful for.
Yes, I’m serious. For many in some ways this has been a bad year. For some it’s been a terrible one. The truth is every year has its good and bad moments for everyone and all of us experience some years that are better for us than others. All we hear these days on the news is complaints regarding the recession. For those who have lost their jobs or their homes then I truly feel for them. Some lost their homes and even their lives this year right here in the UK owing to flooding. In some cases, these people cannot get insurance (or insurance worth having) through no fault of their own. They pick themselves up every time and struggle on while facing ruin.
Although 2010 will be a new year, January 1st is really just another day. Every day people face financial loss, financial ruin. They also face illnesses. They face the loss of loved ones. We’re all facing climate change no matter whether we believe it’s a natural occurrence or because humans have a detrimental impact on the environment. Most of what’s wrong with the world is owing to greed and selfish motivation. Yes, I do believe that. You can trace most everything back to greed. Even war is greed for land, greed for power, greed for dominance including a dominance of faith.
But I want to talk about the recession. We are most certainly in one. There are many reasons for this, too many to mention in a short blog. Some of that recession is down to debt, including personal debt. Many have survived for so long living on credit, not because they’re at fault but because it’s become a socially acceptable standard. I’m not insulting anyone. Just stop and think for a minute. Today’s society has certain expectations and often they are unrealistic ones. I’m remembering my grandparents. My mother’s parents raised three children. They were never able to afford to buy their own home. They both worked although my grandfather was the main breadwinner. They received no such thing as child benefit. In my grandparents’ day if you had children you looked after them without help unless it came from relatives. It was the parents’ job to feed and clothe their children. The state provided an education but the parents got their children to school and bought their school uniform sometimes at great personal cost and sacrifice.
They did the best they could and they did very well with very little. My mother and her siblings would not have dreamed of demanding a Christmas present, let alone something as expensive as a computer or game console as a given. They wouldn’t have expected anything and would have been grateful for whatever they received. They were happy to receive a single item, perhaps even a single item between them.
My grandmother washed her family’s clothes by hand. She rubbed clothes over a glass scrubbing board in a bowl of soapy water, rinsed, and then wrung it through a wringer, finally hanging it out on a line to dry. In bad weather lines of washing would hang from the ceiling of the kitchen. The kitchen was often the hub of the home. It was where the main fire was for they had no such thing as central heating. The rest of the house was cold. I remember my grandfather drawing patterns in the ice on the window telling me Jack Frost had been by. If they wanted a bath they heated water on the stove to use in a tin bath they would pull in front of the fire. The toilet was an outdoor affair where in winters far worse than we see today they would have to take precautions so that their backsides didn’t stick to the seat while they sat there. This ‘in’convenience was in the back yard. It wasn’t a garden. It was mostly a concrete yard with one fenced off area where my grandfather would grow vegetables. This wasn’t a hobby; it was a requirement because they couldn’t afford not to. My grandmother would make heartwarming stews with few provisions and yet I have this vivid memory of these stews, which always contained butter beans. I loved those beans.
I know, it sounds as if I’m two hundred years old and this is some Victorian melodrama but you would be wrong. I am talking less than 40 years ago and no, my grandparents weren’t poverty-stricken or peculiar. They were normal, hard-working people. They didn’t expect much in life because they’d never ‘had’ much in life. They never had the opportunity to go abroad and having a family holiday at the seaside was an untold luxury. We’re in a recession and while I’m not belittling the ill-effects anyone has experienced, I think it’s too easy to forget that so many do not know what true hardship is. It’s too easy to forget how quickly life has changed for most of us in a very short time. People complain when they don’t have more than one holiday in a year. Television? Some houses have one in every room. My grandparents never saw television until my uncle brought one home. Theirs was one of the first houses in the street to have one because of the job my uncle did. Even then, televisions were black and white and only three channels. They were incredibly expensive. Now they are throwaway items too easily chucked out not because they’re faulty but because everyone wants the latest in technology. Mobile phones? My grandparents didn’t even have a phone. They didn’t own a car. Even when there was a bus service if they could walk the distance, they did so because buses cost money and money could always be used elsewhere. In their day, they would have been mortified to buy anything on credit and yet nowadays credit has become a way of life. I’m happy to say I know people who prefer to teach their children that if they want something they cannot always have it immediately and need to save for it.
I’m not suggesting we should want to return to such times or even look back on them fondly but I do think we have a lot to learn by them, especially the younger generations. Too many of us have been too used to a life of plenty for so long we’ve forgotten how easily such things can be stripped away from any one of us. We’ve forgotten how to be grateful. We’ve forgotten how to recognise the truly important things in life and if nothing else that is what this time of year should be used for. We should spare the time to acknowledge what we are thankful for, or should be.
