7-8 years ago, I had understood that it was still important
for someone to talk about the hidden depression of Christmas, in contrast to the habitual joyful messages and the atmosphere of the “happy family warmth”.
And I enjoyed much writing every year about this not so widely talked, dark and rather unpleasant aspect of Christmas.
However, this year something changed inside me.
I felt that those important notes about the depression of Christmas have slowly became a trend.
Everyone is talking, writing, and posting and re-posting about the depression in the period of Christmas.
Moreover, numerous psychologists out there speak about it, analysing and interpreting it from several points of view, trying to impress their audience by presenting a “revolutionary” unconventional image.
You could say, that to see the dark aspect of a conventional look at Christmas so widely accepted, is a step forward. But I have a different opinion.
To me, everything originally bold and sharp that is becoming in time trendy and popular while everyone just tend to speak about it but without being connected to it, is NOT anymore revolutionary.
On the contrary. By becoming trendy it is stripped of its original power. It becomes something neutral, one more message to be sold in the market of social media. Finally, this transformation reinforces what need originally gave birth to the once bold and sharp message (even in history, what ones was revolutionary most of the times becomes new fascistic regime).
So, when talking for the hidden dark feelings during the Christmas’ family celebrations becomes trendy and neutralised in the social media soup, IT DOESN’T MEAN AT ALL THAT WE ARE ACCEPTING MORE OUR RESPONSIBILITY for these feelings or that we actually developed an unconventional and authentic stance in Christmas.
In other words, it does not mean that we are in fact doing something different about our authenticity than talking about what a pity it is to lose it…
It’s not my intention to be snob, but
because I subjectively sense that talking about the hidden depression of Christmas is simply trendy -thus totally meaningless- I prefer and chose to remain silent and not to write this year anything about the dark aspects of Christmas.
Let’s each one of us “celebrate” what he/she wants in Christmas and however he/she wants it to be celebrated, even if it is horribly conventional or ridiculously and fashionably revolutionary.
However, let’s be also responsible on wondering just a little about what we prefer to see in Christmas – to be aware of the consequences of our festive preferences or to hide the meaning of these consequences while eating sweets and stuffed turkey…
So, I just wish
for all of us to always manage, in the wild, the incomprehensible and the wondrous of the world, to find, inside and outside ourselves, worthy for us things and to dare to celebrate them… even when we mourn them.