Christmas is here again with all its consumerist excitement.
It's tempting to throw yourself into it.
To believe for just a few short weeks that the world is simply full of joy and love and lots of mulled wine.
It's tempting to look at the excited faces of the Father-Christmas-believing children and say "Santa Claus is coming to town."
It's tempting to sit at your work Christmas dinner and soak up the alcohol-drenched 'Joy-to-the-world," ambiance.
It's tempting to join in with the familiar carols, the tunes that take us back to a a better time.
"Peace on Earth and mercy mild."
Whatever happened to that?
While all around us the storm clouds are gathering, we hang on to our glitter-filled, bauble- shaped dreams and hope that by hanging them on our Christmas trees, the world become a better place.
We have to keep hoping, right?
last night I helped at a Christmas party for students with special needs coming home for Christmas.
It was organised by our daughter, Mia.
She found the hall, the DJ, sent persuasive texts to friends, siblings ( and her brother Joss) and together they created a magical night.
There were traumas, there was dancing, there was much flirting.
Like any home coming friendships had to be retrieved and re-shaped and re-kindled.
And they were.
And at the end of the evening, one of the mums came up to Mia and said:
"Thank you, you have done something amazing tonight because it was done out of pure kindness."
That meant a lot to Mia.
But I think it might have meant even more to me.
Like a wake-up call, I felt those words send a shock through my body and
wrap themselves around my heart.
" Pure kindness," - how often are our actions shaped by that?
How often do we do something that is purely kind?
In the crazy, frightening, divisive world, I think we might have forgotten how to do it.
And yet it takes so little..
Pure kindness doesn't need a hall or a DJ or a sound system.
It doesn't come with a price tag or a money-back guarantee or a present receipt.
You should expect no thank you letter.
it's not tangible or concrete.
But all the same, I think it might be the greatest gift we can give..
It's a gift that can take courage and thought and time.
It's a gift is easy to forget about or hide right at the bottom of the pile.
It's a gift that is impossible to wrap.
But it's not what it looks like that matters.
In the end, pure kindness is the light that can guide us through these zig-zagging days of distrust and darkness because no one can stop us from making it shine.
I think it might be our most powerful weapon in these days of growing hate and injustice.
i say, this year, let's give pure kindness a go.
.
So Happy Christmas/ Holidays/ Days off work - and here's to next year being everything that this year wasn't.
Here's to 2017 being the year we find the courage to be truly kind.
Christmas is over and the new year is not yet here.
We are back, once again in those nameless inbetween-days recovering from over indulgence.
Those of us who don't have to go back to work yet are meant to be recovering from the excesses of Xmas and filling our days with nothing but relaxation.
And yet....there is a vague sense of edginess, a feeling that we are waiting for something that hasn't happened yet..
For a new year? A new beginning? A return to work? A return to all things familiar and slightly boring?
Time pressures have disappeared, replaced, instead, by the pressures of filling time.
There is no reason to get up in the morning.
No reason to eat breakfast before lunch.
No particular reason to do anything at any particular time.
We are free to do nothing at all.
And all this freedom and resting takes a lot of getting used to.
We have all the time in the world to spend with the people we've been longing to spend all the time in the world with.
And suddenly all the time in the world can seem like a big,beckoning space.
With as long as we want to talk about everything we have meant to talk about all year,we find that we have suddenly run out of words.
We are used to making conversation in short, urgent bursts.
We live in a world of sound-bites, rushed conversations and 60 second news.
In a world of acronyms and text speak.
Sitting, listening to our teenage children and their teenage cousins huddled together on the sofa on Christmas Day, I found myself wondering if they had actually started to speak a different language.
Theirs is a world shaped by social media sentences and individual letters instead of words.
Sometimes it feels as though conversation is a dying art
Grudgingly all the cousins, 4 boys and 3 girls, had agreed to participate in the dramatised court-case involving stolen jewels and dubious characters that their grandad had written especially for them.
But under pretend cross -examination they answered mostly with monosyllables and giggles and the odd 'LOL." or "TY."
Try as he might, their once-upon-a-lawyer grandad, could not really get them to enter into the spirit of his little drama.
The ad-libbed performance, supposed take up most of the afternoon, lasted only half an hour before the teenagers made their escape.
" I sent them the outline a week ago," complained their grandad, ' they were meant to read it and create their characters. They've had lots of time."
"Perhaps they've had too much time," I suggested. " Perhaps it would have worked better if you had given them the outline 10 minutes before it started and told them they had 5 minutes to create their characters."
" How can you create a character in 5 minutes,"sighed their grandad, folding away his Christmas masterpiece.
But the truth is, 5 minutes is all that it takes.
5 minutes is all that it takes for the world to change completely.
5 minutes is all that it takes for planes to fly into buildings, for bombs to explode, for river banks to burst or for freak waves to wash away an entire island.
5 minutes is all that it takes for crazy people to do crazy things.
So 5 minutes is definitely enough time for lively teenagers to create make-believe characters.
Our lives are a chain of sometimes-intense, sometimes-meaningless 5 minute intervals linked together by hopes and dreams and the occasional bar of chocolate.
Christmas day faded into Christmas night.
The teenagers turned the music up and danced their way into boxing day., chattering happily in their mostly incomprehensible language about mostly incomprehensible things.
And as we " oldies," sat and watched, we couldn't help smiling.
Smiling at the happiness they found just by being together.
Smiling at the fun they were having.
Smiling at the memories they were creating.
Because what I've realised as I'm writing this, is that it's not the speed at which we live our lives that matters, but the depth and strength of the memories we create.
And one day, when all-the-time-in-the-world weighs heavily upon our shoulders, it's remembering all the 5 minutes filled with love and life and laughter that will keep us going.
So here's to 2016 being a year full of perfect 5-minute-moments...and lots and lots of chocolate.
