Old Lad

So here we are again – Christmas Eve! Am I excited- well not really. I must confess that for a long time I have had mixed feelings about Christmas. It probably started when I qualified in Medicine and had to endure the false jollity of Christmas on the Ward. On the surface the public reckoned that it was all jolly japes between doctors and nurses but underneath it could be sad. And we always had deaths. When I became a GP in the 1970s the weeks leading up to Christmas always seemed to include sad things happening to families. We went through a spate of teenagers being killed on motor bikes around Christmas and I always felt desperately sorry for families who would thereafter have Christmas as a sad anniversary. So as the years went by I had this sense of apprehension in the weeks leading up to the festival. Of course there were happy times when our children were young enough to believe in Santa. There is nothing quite like waking at 6am on Christmas morning and hearing shouts of “He’s been!” And we had some memorable family get togethers. So there were some positive things to look forward to.

However now Christmas doesn’t produce the same sense of anticipation and I think the reason is that a lot of the things that were special about Christmas have been diluted by the way we live now.. Let me give some examples. Christmas shopping was an annual ritual involving a day out in one of the bigger towns or cities – now we do it on line. There were certain foods that were seasonal to Christmas – dates, mixed bags of nuts, chocolate oranges, twiglets, sprouts, tangerines, spiced biscuits – now they are in the shops all year round, and chocolate oranges have got smaller! ( I digress to say I await the first prosecution under the trades description rules for supermarkets that describe tangerines as easy peelers!) We have become a society which expects everything all the time and seasonality has gone. And I suppose part of the attraction of Christmas was that it was this festival in the midst of the dark nights which offered something different.

I am not a grinch by any means . I do enjoy Christmas things – Christmas lights, carols, family get togethers, silly jokes in crackers and dressing up as Santa Claus for our Rotary Club sleigh. But as the years go by it just seems like an ordinary day. Although if you are a five or six year old I’m sure it doesn’t! Merry Christmas.

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