Nuala O’Loan“There is little left to draw on for Christmas, yet Christmas will come”, writes Nuala O’Loan
As Christmas approaches the shops are filling with sparkle and lights and festive music. It all suggests a time of great anticipation and hope. That is what Christmas is about. Or maybe that is what Christmas should be about, but isn’t for so many people.
I don’t want to sound like Scrooge, but how many people run around endlessly trying to find presents, getting tired, worrying about the bills, trying to meet expectations, which maybe don’t even exist? How many people are really exhausted after all that running around, when Christmas actually comes? Presents get recycled too! Every year in the pro-cathedral in Dublin just after Christmas, they collect the presents that people don’t want, hundreds of them and redistribute them to people who do want them, as best they can. Other organisations do this too.
Something has gone wrong. In all the glitz and glamour of Christmas something is missing. There are always so many people for whom it is a hard time, or a lonely time, maybe a time to remember those who don’t sit down for dinner any more, possibly just because they have had to leave to get jobs elsewhere and can’t afford to come home for Christmas.
Maybe you remember a Christmas like that. There are people who just don’t get a present from anyone.
Uncertainties
We all know that there are many families living on so little in the midst of today’s economic uncertainties, families who struggle all the year round to pay for their homes, to put food on the table, and to clothe their children.
Most often it is not their fault that life is so difficult. Nobody wants to be poor. Especially now when Christmas is coming – the season of good will and peace on Earth – the time when we remember that most sacred of moments, the Christ child’s birth, the time which should be filled with happiness and mystery and wonder. Yet, at this wonderful time, so many families will face yet again the hugely challenging problem of trying to provide for their children in the way they really want to.
Ireland has been in serious economic difficulties for about nine years now. There is little left to draw on for Christmas, yet Christmas will come, and there will be huge pressure on parents to buy the latest gifts and clothes. No matter that buying those things will put many parents into debt for the whole of next year, the advertising industry will inundate children with ideas for things they should want.
Parents will do their best to ensure that their children do not feel deprived or uncared for, but it will be at huge cost. Many will feel that if they can’t buy things without approaching the moneylender, or the bank, if they are lucky, then that is what they must do. Then they struggle to pay the debt off.
With that debt will come worry, because inevitably there will be other unforeseen expenses during the year – through sickness, redundancy, bereavement their situation may change for the worse. There will be also the foreseen expenses – the first Holy Communions, the Confirmations, the transition to secondary school, even the 18th birthday, all of which will cost, and all of which must be provided for in a particular way in our world which has changed so much over the past 50 years. Things could be done differently, but our world is very demanding and can seem reluctant to accept that reality.
So the original debt becomes a millstone around the neck of so many who will be repaying it at exorbitant rates long after the toys have ceased to be so important, or have even been broken or cast aside.
In our parishes too there will be people, some disabled and elderly, who live alone, or with carers, often members of their family who devote their lives to them selflessly with love but who often have very little because as a society we do not value those who care for others enough. There will be people who can’t even leave their homes without help, people struggling to survive on a pension or benefits which just do not seem enough to keep them warm and fed and clothed.
We have a few problems around Christmas! Wherein lies the solution? Is it possible to de-commercialise Christmas – to ‘put Christ back into Christmas?’ Probably not this year, but as members of Catholic parishes across Ireland perhaps we could try even harder to make our faith a reality, opening our eyes to see what is around us, and then trying to work out what we could do to try and help. There are so many ways we can help.
We can ask ourselves what we can do. Could we initiate something in our parish or community? Could we respond with even more generosity on every occasion on which we are asked to help?
It might be by visiting the lonely, collecting for the annual SVP Christmas collections, giving what money we can, helping with a parish Christmas dinner for the elderly, bringing people who don’t have transport to the carol concerts, especially the children’s carol concerts, which bring such pleasure to so many, young and old, organising a children’s parish Christmas party with toys from Santa, helping clear up after the parties, or giving to organisations like Catholics Caring who collect hampers for families or responding to other calls to get involved. There is much we can do.
When I was a little girl, after my father died, we were very poor and, as the eldest, I knew how much my mother struggled to make Christmas for the eight of us. Yet we loved Christmas, and we set out to walk to Midnight Mass, at 11.30pm, knowing that this was a very special time, when we would visit the crib in the chapel, staying up later than we ever stayed up, because it was Christmas. I still remember that, and the wonder of the arrival of the Christmas hamper from the SVP, full of things we could not normally afford, and of the tin of Roses’ chocolates which brought magic into our lives, as we opened them and the brightly jewel-coloured sweets tumbled through our little fingers, once a year treats which seemed so wonderful! Children remember the simplest things with such joy.
It is just over seven weeks to Christmas. If each of us decided to try to make a difference to someone else’s Christmas, perhaps most importantly be being generous with our time, how much happiness might be spread, and how much the story of the coming of the Christ child with all that that means for us, would be a reality in our parishes and our country.
Maybe the question we have to ask ourselves is how much do we really love the Christ child who became the Saviour of the world, who lives in each of his people, and who loved each of us even before we were formed in the womb? If we love him as he has loved us, we really could choose to make Christmas a much happier time in Ireland this year.