Xmas, kids fighting and arguing no matter how much they get. I muse on when they might discard the toys and sit in the boxes they were packaged in. All part of the season. Boxing gloves might be the thing to get them next year. It would go with their irrepressible pugilistic spirit.
Still, overall a laid back sort of day punctuated by an afternoon sleep, which is not just the residue of an old jail habit. Yesterday most of the day was spent up north visiting family and friends. It exhausted all of us. Hauling two fighting kids all over a crowded Belfast induces severe chid lag in adults. A day in bed would hardly compensate for it or replenish the lost reserves of energy. The slow down that is Xmas day seems a just reward for the stress undergone in the run up to it. Every year I think ‘this has to stop’ but it never does.
Today I also took the time to write to a very close friend who lost her son a couple of months ago. He took his own life. I refrained from sending her a Xmas card. I simply did not know what to say in it. Good tidings and all that seem so awkward and short of the mark in times of grief. Better to write something on the day and hope that in some small way it will bring a touch of comfort to her no matter how minuscule or fleeting. Any respite from the burden of unbearable grief must always be welcome. When we lived in Belfast, each Xmas Eve I would visit her and her children. Gifts would be exchanged. For her son it started out as toy, then sports books and in the last years of his life it was a bottle of his choice. It is a present that marks a coming of age. The age of innocence is gone to be replaced by other things. In his case, sadly, the age of old was to elude him. He never made it past his twenties. And now that empty place at the dinner table leaves a gaping vacuum that simply will not be plugged no matter how the chairs are rearranged or guests assembled.
How she gets through today is beyond me. There is no replacing the loss of a child and Christmas becomes something else altogether once it happens. As much as mine fight and squabble they are there in front of me flowing along in perfect rhythm with the natural order of things.
Then there are others who fail to appreciate their children at all, who in fact torture and kill them. Few and far between such parents may well be, but it seems certain that for some kids today was a nightmare. No toys, maybe not even food. Much of this is related to the dire poverty experienced by loving parents. For others when an absence of love is thrown in with the rest of the emptiness it is the result of brutal parents who place their own pleasure above that of their children. In some cases their greatest disappointment is that they have to spend Xmas day in jail, punishment for the unspeakable acts they have inflicted on their children. A happy Xmas for them is one spent at home breaking a child’s rib or two, smearing their faces in the contents of a selection box to fool any flibbertigibbet of a social worker who might happen by.
Settling down with my wife for the remainder of the evening, glasses in hand, fire blazing, TV in front of us, the bickering and hollering fading in the background, I reflect mundanely that Xmas like much else in life amounts to different things for different people. Yesterday in Belfast people were spending as if there were no tomorrow. Those who stayed at home for the most part had little or nothing to spend. The consumer culture reaches its zenith as society celebrates the birth of a Christ whose abhorrence of affluence and materialism it has long since forgotten.
The point in raising it is that there is no point in raising it. It will be the same again next year.
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No comment on the passing of Sean McKenna? Sean also suffered much in Long Kesh and after,
ReplyDeleteOne wondering in USA.
Indeed. There will be material appearing on Sean. He suffered greatly and bore the physical legacy of the hunger strikes in a way that others were fortunate to escape. All seven men on the 1980 hunger strike, regardless of what political trajectory their future paths took, have a special place in the hearts of many who knew them and were involved in protest with them.
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