It is the eve of Christmas Eve and I have yet to start my Christmas shopping. I am panicking – but it’s the sort of panic that only flutters in the tummy, if you know what I mean. Because it’s not like I am doing anything about it: instead I am wrapped up in a fleece, plopped on the sofa by the Christmas tree, with my laptop open. I figure it’s too late for online shopping, so instead, as you do when you’re panicking, I start watching Christmas adverts.
I love Christmas adverts. Because they are not adverts of Marks & Spencer or Coca Cola or John Lewis or whatever the brand; they are mini movies. They don’t show a product and try and persuade us to buy it. There is no one in a bikini trying to sell you a driller, no one wearing Rolex trying to sell you a car, no one in a minimalist kitchen trying to sell you a brand of pasta, and most of all, no one has nails painted red.
People in Christmas adverts, for just this once every year, look like normal-ish people, who happen to be all warmly dressed up, live in marvellously cosy homes, wear Christmas hats, and throw snowballs at each other.
And so we have stories about dogs and foxes bouncing on a trampoline; Mrs Clause jumping on a helicopter to deliver a present her husband had forgotten behind; a family and their pointy-eared dog singing Christmas carols. Then for a brief, flitting second, at the end of the advert, there’s the logo of the company, which doesn’t really make you think ah-let-me-go-and-buy-from-there.
I suppose I love watching these adverts because they make me feel warm and fuzzy, which is exactly what I need. If I could write a letter to Santa, I would ask for central heating: my chilled bones are exhausted from fighting the fight every Maltese is born to fight against the dreaded umdità.
Shall we make a new rule of life from tonight: always to try to be a little kinder than is necessary?
I think this is why we are grumpier in winter. Unlike the people in the UK or US adverts, we cannot wear T-shirts when inside the house, we don’t wake up in the morning and cry “It’s snowing!” and we cannot head out for a snow fight to cheer us up.
Instead, we have dull, grey weather, and rain and humidity. If Marks & Spencer had to film their advert in Malta, they would get people wearing Santa hats pushing their gas heaters with them wherever they move around the house. They would get people huddling in their parkas around the oven while the turkey is cooking. They would get people sitting round the table having endless discussions about whether they ought to get a dehumidifier or a pellet stove and whether gas heaters encourage the mould to come out or not. Above all, of course, they would get people tut-tutting, saying that Christmas isn’t what it used to be when they were young and that now it’s all gone commercial.
Hang on though, people have been complaining about ye olde Christmas since forever. Charles Dickens complained of this in 1836; and then, in Christmas of 1909, police were called in to break up the crowds that entirely blocked London’s Regent Street because everyone was shopping so much.
Mark Forsyth, the author of A Christmas Cornucopia, says that in AD386, Gregory of Nazianzus (google him; he looks quite the unjolly chap, bless) wrote that everybody had forgotten the true, religious meaning of Christmas and that it was all about “feasting to excess, dancing, and crowning the doors”. Seeing as Christmas on December 25 was first recorded some 30 years earlier (in AD354), it looks like there was never really a time when people used to sit around and contemplate the wonders of the Nativity.
And yet, deep down, we all long to. Which is what these mini advert-movies are all about at the end of the day. We don’t just want to celebrate, we want our souls to celebrate too. Shopping and decorating and wearing red hats doesn’t quite cut it. What can we do?
On the bookshelf by the Christmas tree, where I am still parked, I spot my old copy of The Little White Bird by J.M. Barrie. I pick it up and smell the smell of old book pages, then I start leafing it and notice a dog-eared page in Chapter 4. It’s to mark this quote: “Shall we make a new rule of life from tonight: always to try to be a little kinder than is necessary?”
That’s all it takes, really, to make Christmas Great Again.
Merry Christmas.
krischetcuti@gmail.com
Twitter: @KrisChetcuti