A rhinestone Xmas

DAMN! I tried so hard to have a happy Christmas, but the best I managed was a somewhat disjointed crazy kinds-in-the-kitchen porridge of highs and lows. I can’t say I expected much from Christmas itself. Since I’ve aged and grown more and more disillusioned with the general direction this most glorious of lands is taking, cynicism owns this neighbourhood.

Of course, being MDD doesn’t help one little bit either.

I think I brought much joy to the handful of special people that have stuck with me. And they in turn tried so hard to make Xmas 2007 happy for me too. It’s not their fault it wasn’t.

I my view the celebration of the birth of Jesus ben Joseph (whether the actual historical date and all that crap is true or not) as significant. Far too significant for most human intellects to grasp so we childishly pooh-pooh it and try to drown it in crass gaudy commercialism.

Where most of the other so-called holidays are more commercial inconveniences relevant to a dwindling bucket of people, Christmas has become more and more a milestone for doleful reflection. From silent sanctity of Bethlehem, where mankind glimpsed glory, we have chosen the raucous bedlam and the ersatz hope the lies in Las Vegas.

Not even the atheist and agnostics can quite get a grip on it. Probably goes too far back in antiquity to neatly dissect the event like a splayed out frog. It has proven way beyond the ken of even someone as clever and learned as Richard Dawkins. Their fragile prattle is as gaudy and fatal as the banter of good croupier.

Now that the kids are grown up and carving power careers in someone else’s land — no grandkids yet — I derive a special pleasure from the few children around me. The vast masses are too amorphous and sound like swarms of Christmas beetles — “Gimmeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee” — to ease my achy-breaky heart.

I can’t even drown myself in the sweet, comforting oblivion of Mama Vodka anymore. And Granny Green just makes me paranoid. And after a couple of hours the sapping tedium of small-talk and “how are things going …?” has drained every last drop of bon cheer out of me, even the gammon, and turkey, and roast mutton, and veggies, and trifle become some much-flavoured latex in my plate.

Where I do draw solace and the strength to put one foot in front of another in the perennial pointless parade like flamingo chicks across the Namib towards next year is staring at the natural world. Watching weavers flirt and advertise, lizards finding just the right spot for tanning, Vulcan hounding the ever-moving shade, transported by the muffled put-put-put-put of the kreepy.

I absently trace the smooth lines of my simple wooden crucifix (given to me by an angel when I was dippy in Durban) much like someone who has given up smoking needs something to occupy their hands.

And I drift off into/out of/on to somewhere else where verity, hope, fides, caritas, agape and beauty dwell. Where they are really real and mean something. I drink long from the smooth, soft waters in the fountains, talk to God about anything and everything at length — and He talks back — and for a short while there is bliss, balance, equanimity and good in my world.

Then someone phones to say, “How are things going?”, or an SMS come through making me feel like Glen Campbell’s Rhinestone Cowboy — “getting messages from people I don’t even know”.

And this crude, insensitive, hideous, savage world comes barging in through the front door like some giant lurching vacuous atheist heathen drunk hell-bent on ensuring I have as much of a good time as he is too.