Christmas discomfort
For the past week, my e-mail box has been full of good wishes. As the work before the holiday season ends and the last rehearsals have taken place, we inevitably leave each other wishing to everyone a happy holiday.
It is good practice to ask your interlocutors what they will do during their holidays. The majority of the answers will revolve around the family’s call because if there is a time to visit relatives after the funeral, it is Christmas and New Year’s Day.
We quickly understand it, I don’t have the Christmas spirit tattooed in my heart. I could list here all the reasons, the origins of this unease, but that would be a sign of suspicious zeal.
If I cannot prove it by the intellect, I will write it with the heart. Christmas is a family celebration. I don’t have a family. I love my parents, my sisters, that’s not the question, but since I’m not inclined to visit people, why should I have to do it between the 25th and the 1st?
Am I lazy? Yes. And then no. I am probably merely selfish, even if I have a big heart. I don’t want to make a big deal out of it, but I give a lot to people. I also learn a lot from watching them, from interacting with them. I am fond of knowing them, but I am an infidel, because, like a poet, I prefer the path to the cottage. I don’t like to do what everyone else does. Traditions annoy me, especially since I see too many people pretending to be happy together.
But let us continue the honesty approach. Sometimes I feel alienated from myself. I am, once again, like a disenchanted and disaffected troubadour, inclined to withdraw and hope for an hour that will never come back. It seems to me that 2012 was the year of waiting. It seems to me that I work very hard, like you, and that nothing succeeded. I am impatient, I have already written it as if my life had suddenly become too short.
Make no mistake about it. You would invite me to your home that I would be the most pleasant guest. I would gladly eat from your pie, I would gulp down your alcohol and make you laugh, my happiness would be honest and in no way fake. I know how to do it, to have fun. Then why is it that I have a throbbing violin that plays too damply? Do not answer me, because I know that you know and that, once the helm is off, you will still wish me a happy holiday.
I have no answers to submit, I have no lessons to give to anyone. So, Guy, shut up and have this drink, tell your friends and family that you love them. The rest is nothing more than a literature of truths, a heap of mysteries that go beyond your consciousness.
In short, I wish you happy hours. Be in solidarity, be glad to be alive and do what must be done, because your actions are the only value on which you can claim to be alive. Our planet, our humanity depends on it.
Amen. In my own way. I would have made a good priest, a friend once told me. He is not wrong, and everyone knows it, a priest is not happy at Christmas time. Too much work.
