Skip to main content

My Christmas


The only religious festival that buoyed up my spirit when I was a boy was Christmas.  The Holy Week with Good Friday dominating it was the antithesis of Christmas.  Easter didn’t really mean anything much to me except interruption of good sleep to attend the predawn church service.  Christmas too fractured the sleep with its midnight church rituals.  But that was fun too with the crib, the stars, the Christmas tree and the Santa. 

We would spend the entire Christmas Eve preparing the crib at home.  The festive mood that pervaded the entire atmosphere not only at home but also in the village was ebullient. 

My Christmas Tree

There was more to Christmas than all that ebullience, however.  There was romance in it: a feeling of mystery, excitement and otherworldliness.  The myth of Joseph travelling with pregnant Mary braving the winter’s chill through the wilderness of Bethlehem, their helpless search for a place to stay, Jesus’ birth in a cave in the company of cattle, the first carol sung by angels, the shepherds who responded to the heavenly music and the Magi from the east were all copious fodder for a child’s wild imagination.  

Even today, when I have learnt a lot more about Jesus than those childish myths and fables, Christmas has not lost its charm for me – not entirely, at least.  I love the stars and the illumination.  I love the light that accompanies Christmas. 

It doesn’t really matter whether Jesus was born on 25 Dec or some other day.  In all probability, history will never be able to tell us that precise date.  It doesn’t matter whether the angels sang the carol of peace and joy.  But the peace and joy matter much.  Christmas is essentially about peace and joy.  I would like to believe so, at least.

Was Jesus a joyful person?  I don’t think so.  In the novel I’m writing (facing writer’s block currently), Jesus appears as a man who was disillusioned with mankind, as one who embraces the cross in profound helplessness.  Whatever I have read about Jesus has not led me to make even the faintest of assumptions that Jesus ever smiled.  Jesus must have been acutely conscious of the profound absurdity of human existence.  He couldn’t have preached the Sermon on the Mount otherwise, especially what he said about the righteous: that they are sure to be persecuted but they will discover their heaven.  [I have my personal interpretations of Jesus’ teachings.]

No spiritual mystic can be a joyful being, I think.  William James (philosopher-psychologist) argued that insanity can hail from the same psychological source as genuine mysticism.  Melancholy is concomitant with that insanity.  Deepest spiritual truths often emerge from melancholy and some insanity.  Joyfulness is quite a different matter. 

Christmas is joyful.  I love that joyfulness.  I love smiles.  I love stars.  Let me extend joyful Christmas greetings to you whatever Christmas may mean to you.


Comments

  1. Durga Prasad DashDecember 25, 2017 at 7:50 PM

    Wishing you a merry Christmas and all the best for your novel in progress.

    ReplyDelete
  2. alicetaylor123January 5, 2018 at 12:18 PM

    I have read this above post its very nice for us thanks sharing ,great post


    potaup

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Indian Knowledge Systems

Shashi Tharoor wrote a massive book back in 2018 to explore the paradoxes that constitute the man called Narendra Modi. Paradoxes dominate present Indian politics. One of them is what’s called the Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS). What constitute the paradox here are two parallel realities: one genuinely valuable, and the other deeply regressive. The contributions of Aryabhata and Brahmagupta to mathematics, Panini to linguistics, Vedanta to philosophy, and Ayurveda to medicine are genuine traditions that may deserve due attention. But there’s a hijacked version of IKS which is a hilariously, if not villainously, political project. Much of what is now packaged as IKS in government documents, school curricula, and propaganda includes mythological claims treated as historical facts, pseudoscience (e.g., Ravana’s Pushpaka Vimana as a real aircraft or Ganesha’s trunk as a product of plastic surgery), astrology replacing astronomy, ritualism replacing reasoning, attempts to invent the r...
17 comments
Read more

The Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti...
31 comments
Read more

Waiting for the Mahatma

Book Review I read this book purely by chance. R K Narayan is not a writer whom I would choose for any reason whatever. He is too simple, simplistic. I was at school on Saturday last and I suddenly found myself without anything to do though I was on duty. Some duties are like that: like a traffic policeman’s duty on a road without any traffic! So I went up to the school library and picked up a book which looked clean. It happened to be Waiting for the Mahatma by R K Narayan. A small book of 200 pages which I almost finished reading on the same day. The novel was originally published in 1955, written probably as a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi and India’s struggle for independence. The edition that I read is a later reprint by Penguin Classics. Twenty-year-old Sriram is the protagonist though Gandhi towers above everybody else in the novel just as he did in India of the independence-struggle years. Sriram who lives with his grandmother inherits significant wealth when he turns 20. Hi...
9 comments
Read more

Ghost with a Cat

It was about midnight when Kuriako stopped his car near the roadside eatery known as thattukada in Kerala. He still had another 27 kilometres to go, according to Google Map. Since Google Map had taken him to nowhere lands many a time, Kuriako didn’t commit himself much to that technology. He would rather rely on wayside shopkeepers. Moreover, he needed a cup of lemon tea. ‘How far is Anakkad from here?’ Kuriako asked the tea-vendor. Anakkad is where his friend Varghese lived. The two friends would be meeting after many years now. Both had taken voluntary retirement five years ago from their tedious and rather absurd clerical jobs in a government industry and hadn’t met each other ever since. Varghese abandoned all connection with human civilisation, which he viewed as savagery of the most brutal sort, and went to live in a forest with only the hill tribe people in the neighbourhood. The tribal folk didn’t bother him at all; they had their own occupations. Varghese bought a plot ...
8 comments
Read more