Why “the Christmas feeling” is more profound than you think.
Most of you know what I mean. It’s December, it’s dark and cold, Christmas adverts have started, Christmas music has begun to appear everywhere, the lights have gone up, you’re bringing a tree in, planning the school nativity play. At some point you feel it — ‘Christmassy’. Even if you don’t, the fact that some of you reading will not only not know what I mean but actively dislike the very idea is as important as the fact that some of you will.
There is, of course, no such thing as Christmas. That is, Christmas is a phenomenon. It is an emergent result of a set of things that act as symbols for an abstract ‘meaning’ of a certain period of time. Christmas is not what any one of those things is, it’s not a tree, not lights, not presents. And as much as say, Christians, will talk about the ‘true meaning’ of Christmas they still partake in the things that root the festival in paganism as much as in the nativity. Christmas contains then two things: a sign system and an abstract meaning.
An element of this is personal, and cultural. The emergent properties are produced over time in a culture and in a lifetime. If you’ve had difficult personal times at Christmas, maybe dislike the materialism or the religious elements of Christmas, have bad…
