Published in 'Noel' Magazine, 2016
(C) Devika Brendon 2016
There was a family we used to know, who
unfortunately carried an annual Christmas ritual too far. They were
originally from the rural areas of their country: a business
executive and his talented, home-making wife, partners of
greatness on an upward social trajectory. When I was young I
took them at their word, at face value, not knowing much about sociology
or class distinction or any of those realities of which we are all now
acutely aware.
They were attractive, charismatic and ambitious. He was on
his way to becoming a CEO, and she was hostessing wonderful dinner
parties and keeping the perfect home beautifully, and involving
herself in art appreciation classes and creative decoration. All was
well, between us, for many years. Until the Christmas Letters started
coming. I recently discovered them all in a bundle, while clearing out
boxes of papers from the garage a couple of months ago, and marvelled at
the social documentary, the slice of life, they provided.
At some point in the 1980s and 90s, this family started
to seriously climb the social ladder in the society of the City in which they
had finally settled. There was a photograph inserted into one of the letters
which showed them with their teenage children, smiling in their garden, having
drawn large circles in chalk inside which they stood,
embracing each other. 'We are moving in only the best circles!'
was the caption, handwritten on the back of the photograph.
Perhaps the concept of Christmas Letters was culturally
specific to that country, so kindly bear with me while I explain.
When people start extending themselves socially, and their contact list grows,
it becomes very difficult for them to write to everyone individually, to 'keep
in touch' at Christmas time, with Season's Greetings and festive wishes and so
forth. Time is money, so their real relationships fade, and business
relationships of the 'win-win' variety take their place. There is no time
to meet up during the week or the year, so their relating takes the form of an
exchange of curriculum vitae: a sort of festival of
interfacing resumes.
The business world emphasises the effective use of time and
effort, so to avoid the tedium of writing the same information over and over
again, this family started to summarise their activities over the year
into a Christmas Letter: itemising the best experiences they had had throughout
the year that had just passed. This transformed into a 'Best Of' list
of overseas trips, events and cultural activities which showcased their
own blossoming forays and awakenings. Best Films Seen. Best Books
Read. Best Restaurant Meals Eaten.
The items omitted from this summary I have, over the years,
come to see as the real substance of a person's life: the failures, the
fears, the internal journeying required by the occurrence of tragedy, of
unenvisaged loss, of unexpected betrayal. The kind of event that Premium life
or Platinum health insurance cannot generally cover.
The CEO took up golf, (of course); they joined their
local Country Club, and started fine dining, during which
they developed their palates to enjoy and speak with
familiarity about European cuisine. Walking tours of Tuscany and the
great gardens of England, France and Italy followed. Tracing their development
year by year, via the annual family roundup, it became clear that they had
become shameless braggarts. Updating their acquaintances in detail, annually, about
how progressive and productive they were being throughout
that year. Celebratory self-congratulation.
Twenty years before the onset of selfies and the
celebrity-style promotion of surfaces and sheen inherent
in modern urban living, this family were pioneers in self-portraiture.
Creating a sort of family brand.
The tremendous self-approval that all this revealed was
remarkable to those outside the corporate world. But in the circles in
which they now moved, the inhabitants went to gyms with names like 'The Winning
Edge', and attended professional development courses with titles like 'The
Unfair Advantage', to help them re-calibrate themselves and deal with the
spiralling stress levels they were experiencing. They had, along the
way, inevitably started to value everything in
life according to a financial estimate of investment and
expected return. 'Look out for Number One' was actual advice they
gave others, with absolutely no sense of irony.
This was my first vision of the
compulsive competitiveness and posturing and positioning
apparently required to 'count for something' and 'make your mark' in the
'best circles'. Year after year, the Christmas Letters came, with
the bullet points of humble bragging making their indelible impact on
their recipients.
We gave the family the benefit of the doubt for as
long as we could, but eventually the generic and impersonal nature of the
relationships they preferred started to grate on our sense of what real
relationships were about. Christmas to me was a time for virtue
signifying: helping out at the soup kitchen for the homeless, without
telling anyone about my participation except the organisers, hearing the
wonderful old songs sung by charity choirs, and baking shortbread and
mulling wine for two, and re-reading Christmas stories like 'The Little
Match Girl' and 'The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe'.
The vast smorgasbords and all you can eat buffets left me
cold, in the air-conditioned palaces of luxury hotels. The 'proud display of
life' was a phrase from the Bible that came vividly to me when I re-read
those Christmas Letters, in their entirety, with the benefit of
retrospection. Sometimes, people allow themselves to become saturated by this
kind of pride.
Please understand! I love Christmas hampers, filled with
good things. But I find as the years pass that the commercialism of the values
which are now pre-ordered and gift-wrapped and presented to
us as 'traditional' are not ones which appeal to me at all. A few
years ago, we gently intimated to this family that we would like to NOT be
included in the vast mail-out of their annual Christmas
Letters.
We loved them as people, we greatly admired their many
escalating achievements, but they were no longer the people we used
to know. The way they had commodified the sacred holiday and turned
it into an opportunity for self-promotion was alienating. And they were not
alone, in this. The whole world turns into a noisy festival of
join-the-dots emotion, plastic sentimentality, and push button
euphoria, an annual orgy of conspicuous consumption, resulting in a
kind of global, community-induced coma.
Summing up, I reject the flurry of emojis
currently available to us, to try to express what the ceasing of
these Christmas Letters means to me. The
genuine compassion I feel today, for that family whose festive
epistles we at last unsubscribed from, is my own version of
the true Christmas spirit.
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