Is it just me or is everyone getting pretty merry about the festive season this year?

First, we had the Christmas retail campaign which began this year … in September! Who can blame them? They have sustained relentless attacks on their bottom lines from Covid-obsessed governments (who made them enforcement officers of State vaccine passport lockouts), to the agents of the online retail revolution (who did alright during the lockdowns).

In the case of my hometown, and many others, the flood-gods took whatever was left, leaving the remnants of Australian small business retail to welcome Christmas with a relish borne of desperation. But in doing so, they have led a burst of Christmas joy, however weird it looked to have the Christmas trimmings out and on display in early spring.

And it isn’t just retail. Everywhere you go, you are likely to cop a smile, especially if you lead with one. Minor kindnesses abound. Perhaps we were smiling all the way through Covid, only we couldn’t see them… Whatever might divide us – there is no need to go through the tedious list – it seems there is still plenty to unite us. Strangers seem to like a head nod and a ‘g’day’. Having experienced life in the Shaky Isles for some years, I can attest that this is almost Kiwi-level friendliness. We are simply lunging at Christmas.

Christmas decorations on the houses and in the gardens seem to have been turbo-charged this year, as the cliché goes. We have a giant Homer Simpson Santa in our street to greet those who enter it. This is not your average effort to emulate Chevy Chase with his over-the-top, crazy light show.

Clearly, after all the travails of the past two and a half years and the apparent desire of citizens to ‘just move on’, people are in the mood for abundant joy. And it isn’t a Seinfeldian ‘Festivus for the rest of us’ we are talking about, with its ‘airing of grievances’, ‘feats of strength’, and the dreaded aluminum ‘pole’. It is real Christmas, whether or not the Baby Jesus gets a guernsey.

Speaking of the Christ-in-Christmas debate, the ABC is starting a new tradition of having a Muslim involved in its Christmas fare.

Naturally for Auntie, it is a faith-to-faith meeting. Lots of ‘diversity’ and less Christianity.

Taking a different approach, Graham Young notes (in the Australian Institute for Progress’s Christmas message):

It’s been a challenging few years and I know that some of you wonder from time to time what the point is of continuing to fight when even our friends conspire to steal our rights and freedoms, bankrupt our economies, and defenestrate merit and facts.

Yet Christmas endures as a time to refresh and reconnect and as an inspiration that out of the implausible, improbable change can grow.

The season of connection may have special meaning, then, for the forcibly disconnected, as a reminder of the very merits of connection. And, through the experience, many of the dissidents – I had better not say ‘freedom fighters’ – among us have newly crafted friendships and connections borne out of a shared bullying experience.

For Graham Young, ‘inspiration’ is also a keyword in the Christmas message. For some, inspiration will be needed to have those difficult conversations over Christmas about lockdowns and vaccines. For these, Monica Smit has advice:

Christmas is coming, and the festive season is upon us. We have a great opportunity to PLANT LOTS OF ‘SEEDS. 

Your intention is everything…if you are trying to out-smart people, you won’t achieve anything. 

If you are doing it out of love and compassion, you will succeed in the end. 

What have you got to lose?

So, Christmas is a teaching opportunity! She also sees Christmas as a season of hope, and she is far from alone there.

Graham Young titled his message: Trying times, but there’s always hope.

Christmas is, indeed, a glass-half-full occasion.

Coincidentally (or not), many in the freedom movement are also Christians, so this is their time of year, and this particular year will cause much reflection for these folks, who have endured so much of late. Of course, some consider we are already in the end times, and they may well be right about that. There is only so much craziness and bad blood in the world that you can encounter without considering that it might, indeed, be all apocalyptic.

Can one’s Christmas become politicised? Is Monica’s gentle call to arms contra the spirit of Christmas? The conspiracy folks will say that spreading goodwill to all this season is simply rolling over in the face of continuing enemy fire. A little like giving in to the lockdowners’ recent call for an ‘amnesty’ for their many (well meant, of course) sins and blunders. Well, even the Germans and French stopped fighting in the trenches of the first world war on Christmas Day and even sang songs together. So, we might put down the weapons for a day. And smile.

It was an unlikely Santa Claus who gave us permission to be festive again.

None other than Daniel Andrews, the King of the Lockdowns and the Prince of Police Brutality, signalled the return of freedom and, incidentally, let the cat out of the bag, when he made it official that the Covid State was no more. In a single phrase – ‘Covid exceptionalism is over’ – Andrews (yes, in pre-election mode, to be sure) simply called off the cops and is now pledged to leaving us alone. Covid was no longer anything to get in a tizz over. It became official policy at a single stroke.

Perhaps Andrews caught his end-of-Covid shtick from his northern neighbour-Premier and unlikely bestie, Dominic Perrottet, who (in the one good set of things he has done as Premier) called a halt to the unvaccinated being banned from shops (in December last year), pulled the Chief Health Officers back from the front of the stage and urged his counterparts in the National Cabinet to make self-isolation voluntary for people testing positive for the dreaded minor virus. With no more treating Covid like a combo of the Black Death and Ebola, with the dreaded and dreadful masks now mostly in the bin, with no one looking at you sideways if you don’t mask up, with the planes once more in the air (with a post-Covid premium, admittedly) and despite the residual Covid theatre (‘We are Covid safe!’), we can now all get on with life and chance to celebrate things we feared we had lost. Like Christmas, still the biggest celebration in the Western world.

All this joy might well be a southern hemisphere phenomenon. Celebrating the Christ-Child and Santa in the heat of high summer is often lamented by those south of the equator who would like nothing more than a traditional white (no racism or colonialism intended) Christmas. This year might just be a blessing in disguise for the southerners. Londoners, Parisians, Berliners, and New Yorkers face extremely grim northern hemisphere times. Their Christmas joy will be somewhat diminished this year as the Europeans have a war (that could go nuclear) just up the road.

Citizens there face tough choices, too, like whether to heat or eat. As we know, the cold kills far more people than the heat. They also have to decide what they are going to do without in order to pay the gargantuan power bills inflicted on them by their green-virtue-signalling governments.

Yes, we have those – greenie governments and sky-high power bills – too. But if we just grab the old esky, load in some ice, and pack a few stubbies, we, at least, can head to the beach, listen to the cricket and grab a wave or two. And forget, however momentarily, the burdens of the world.

In his December 2021 Christmas message, Archbishop Anthony Fisher noted with wisdom:

Phone calls, emails, Facebooking and Zooming are better than nothing. But they’re not the same.

Intimacy requires proximity. Friendship means ‘being there’ for someone, being ‘close’ to those ‘nearest and dearest’ to us, not ‘drawing away’ from them.

True friendship yearns for in-person connection, ‘up close and personal’. That’s what the Christmas story is all about.

Indeed.

At the close of 2022, Covid isn’t over, as the medicos regularly remind us. But at least the insane governments which made mountains out of viral molehills have seen the folly of their ways (absent admitting it, of course), and have taken simply to advising us the wash our hands and stay at home if we are sick. Proper, proportional advice, and no more orders. We do have much to be thankful for this Christmas.

Have a wonderful festive season. And raise a glass or two to freedom and connection.

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