So This Is Christmas...

Christmas has come and gone again, but this year it feels a little odd. In a way, I’m still waiting for it to arrive. Hasn’t it felt like there was just no build-up to it this year, it just sort of crept up on us all? This year there just seemed to be less festivity, less carol singing, less anticipation. Or maybe I’m just growing up, something that I thought wasn’t likely to happen in the never-never land we call Hong Kong.

Christmas always makes me feel a little melancholy, too. Not the whole day; just that for a few short minutes in the day for the past two or three years, I’ve reflected on past Christmas’s, and it saddens me, how much it’s changed for me. I’m sure you’re the same – when you’re only little, Christmas is the most magical time of the year. There are presents and mince pies and singing, and everybody seems to be so in love with everybody else. Everything bad that’s happening, all your uncertain circumstances or times of trial, they all get put on hold for the few days that Christmas consumes, and everybody’s high-spirited and happy. Or so it seems, to a small child. Christmas is made for children. I remember year after year, waking up at the crack of dawn on Christmas morning and racing into my parents’ bedroom to wake them up and then leaping down the stairs to the living room, to see what Santa had brought.

Sad to say, this year, I woke up on Christmas morning only because my Dad had come through to the living room where I was sleeping (I don’t have a bedroom in my parents house anymore) to use the computer. For a minute, it didn’t even hit me what the occasion was. Thank God for the little boy my parents are fostering, the only person in the house who seemed excited about the whole thing. He came into the living room and kissed me, wished me a merry Christmas and proceeded to rip open his parcels, yelling over them like each one was the best gift he’d ever received. Like I said, Christmas is made for children.

That’s another thing about growing up, when it comes to Christmas. When you’re little, everything you open is like gold. It could be anything from the world’s biggest doll house to a packet of jelly beans, to a child, it’s nothing but exciting. As you get older, not only does your yearly pile of parcels diminish in size, but the gifts get less exhilarating and more useful. That’s not to say we don’t still appreciate the presents, but it’s a different kind of appreciation, isn’t it. It’s less “Oh, this is fun!” more “Oh, this will come in handy”.

But I’m talking like Christmas is all about presents and food now. It’s not. I guess the one great thing about understanding Christmas more from an adult point of view is that you really start to appreciate the true meaning behind it – Jesus. That really struck me this year, singing a carol about shepherds going to visit the new-born King: how awestruck they must have been, looking onto that baby and knowing He had come to save the world. How absolutely speechless that must have left them, and how honored they must have felt to be some of the first human beings to stand in His presence. And that’s what makes Christmas something special every year, without fail, is knowing that we’re really celebrating how great God is, that He wanted to share His Son with us in that manner.

Drama, Drama, Drama

Do you know what really bugs me? Television nature programs. They’re all exactly the same, have you ever noticed? They all depict a man or a woman in bad camouflage with war paint on their faces, holding a shaky camera pointed at themselves with various wild animals strolling around in the background. And they all say things like, “Aren’t they the most majestic creatures?” and “You wouldn’t believe it to look at them, but these pint-sized bunnies have been known to swallow daring explorers like me whole, in order to protect their young”. They then proceed to crawl around on their bellies amid these killer bunnies “so as not to pose a threat”.

TV is always much more dramatic than it has to be, though, isn’t it. Whatever type of show it might be, you can bet it’s at least four times as dramatic as anything in real life would ever be. Even by my families standards which, in my opinion, deserve its own soap-opera slot on daytime television.

You get shows like The OC, where everybody’s dated, married or related to everybody else. One Tree Hill, also, is a fantastic example: Haley and Nathan, the 17-year-old pregnant married couple. Nathan’s brother Lucas who flits constantly between Brooke and Peyton who have, by the way, both slept with Nathan too. Lucas has a heart disease; Brooke has her own clothing line; Peyton is, in my opinion, an undiagnosed chronically depressed mess. This is hardly surprising when you consider the facts: two dead moms, an absentee father, a psycho stalker and a secret half-brother. I’m not saying I don’t love the show, but it does prove my point fairly well.

Then you have shows like Oprah and their wildly outrageous stories. “I was born a boy, had a sex change, married this guy and now I’m falling in love with his sister!” Some of the things and people featured on that show leave me feeling fortunate to have a mother and a father who are only married to each other, as well as a dog that I’m not sexually attracted to.

Even the news these days leaves me reeling. Last night I watched as a man sitting in a deck chair was lifted into the air and carried off into the sunset, with the aid of I don’t know how many helium balloons. How much helium would it take, anyway, to lift a fully grown male and his lawn chair that high into the sky? You know what? It’s not even worth thinking about. The fact is, he managed it, and made it onto world news. And that’s what the worlds TV has come to.