Annual Christmas Message

Hello.

With any luck you are reading this at Christmas, or around that time. If you aren't, this is going to make little sense or, at least, it will seem less than topical. So, if you are reading this +/-1 month around the 25th of December, you should probably go and grab a cocoa or something.

I have never been a very big fan of Christmas but, in many ways, that is more to do with the way that I think, than anything wrong with Christmas. My delightful wife is a fan of Christmas and, over the years, that has proven to be contagious. You need to be at least a little bit Christmassy to proceed, and that, of course, has nothing to do with religion. I am, at best, an agnostic and, at worst, Richard Dawkins on an angry, itchy underwear day. So let us, temporarily, redefine Christmassy as meaning 'receptive to inhumanly good cheer, with less trepidation than usual for family gatherings'.

Many of you will have CHRISTmas, some of you will have Christmas, some will have Giftmas, and there are many other possibilities that I won't list, because I'm not part of your culture for this part of the year. However, we call all get behind being nice to people, being optimistic and enjoying time with our families, I suspect. Or at least the idealised notion of all of these.

Now, if you know someone who is going to have a problem with any of those, then maybe it's time to have them to dinner. Or drinks. Or to call up. Or to say 'Hi' to. It's bad enough being isolated at the best of times but Christmas is a great time of loneliness because everyone else is, apparently, having so much fun. So share the fun, please.

Some people don't want the fun and that's their right. Maybe they'll feel like it later. Maybe dinner later in the year would make more sense?

If you are not a Christmas person, then let me suggest the following:

1. Find a good movie of A Christmas Carol. (Patrick Stewart's version, or even Scrooged).
2. Watch it.
3. Drink egg nog (or nog-like substances if you allergic to egg or nog.)
4. Sniff at the end when a severely disabled child says "God Bless Us Everyone"
5. Yell at Nick for not putting item 4 in a *** SPOILERS *** tag.

The next stage is to read a meandering Christmas message from someone. Oh, you're already out of sequence. Oh well.

If, at this stage, you are still staring into the bottom of your 4th stiff rye for the morning, and you don't normally drink before 7pm (or at all), then you can either wait for someone else to read this message and call you, because you might be lonely, or you can try to call other people.

I don't want to trivialise this, but I know what it's like to be so caught up that you can't ask for help. Or so ashamed. Or so scared. Or so lonely. I don't know what you're going through right now, but sitting at home swearing at reindeer will do nothing except give you a home covered in reindeer poop. (They have a mean temper.) When you are the kind of alone that sucks away every other part of your life, it's hard to believe that anything else is out there. Please, try to find it anyway. If you can't bring yourself to reach out, allow yourself to be reached. I don't want to lecture, so I'll move on.

I have some seasonal wishes for all of you who read this and know me, wherever you are and whatever you're doing.

I hope that, if your days are good, that they stay good and that you can enjoy this and share it with other people.

I hope that, if your days aren't so good, they get better and stay better. All of us, whoever and wherever we are, need a hand up occasionally. I don't believe that bad things happening to you means that you're a bad person - well, not anymore - and I certainly don't believe that it's a sign of weakness to accept help. It's a sign of stupidity, certainly, to refuse to help someone in need because you're making some half-assed moral stance or judging the worth of someone else's life. Someone may help you, in the future, you may help someone. You don't need karma to make that happen. A better world is just that, a better world.

When you see injustice or stupidity, I hope that you have the strength to fight it and try to put things right. Our appreciation of what is right or wrong, moral or immoral, may vary. I hope that there is room in your hearts for a kinder, more gentle world because I don't think that judgemental, semi-objectivist stupidity has done us much good so far.

I hope that you have the strength to look at statements and actions to see what people really meant to do or say, rather than nitpicking away to address tiny outlier points, or to cut someone down, or purely for the sake of argument because it amuses you. Pedantry has its place. Life is not an essay you submit for assessment. We have enough devils, we only need so many advocates.

Wherever you are, whatever you're doing, if you can do one thing extra that is good, or benefits someone else, during this time, try to do it if you can. If everyone did this, we'd have over 6,000,000,000 positive actions in the space of a week. That's the moral equivalent of going back in a time machine to slip Justin Bieber's mother a functional contraceptive or stopping Highlander II from being made.

I hope that I can do all of these things too, because I don't, always. If nothing else, why not try?

Whatever you were thinking of getting out of this time of year, I hope that it exceeds your positive expectations and meets none of your pessimistic predictions.

If I know you, I thought of you, wherever you are, living or dead, while I wrote this. It turns out I know quite a lot of people! I miss a lot of you because I haven't seen you for a while but I am always hopeful of reunions, if not soon, then sometime. Some of you could, I'm just saying, actually come to Australia for a change. Preferably not while I'm overseas, though, I'd take that personally.

Enough of my ramblings. Get on out there, be good, live well. love lots. Have a great festive season and an excellent new year!