Shattering the silence of the night

There are 22 children in our country who must be feeling really great this Christmas. They would not have gone shopping for goodies; there may be no one to give them presents for Christmas; they may not go to church through the Christmas season; their hopes of success in the GCE O/L would have been dashed; yet their joy at being free would give them the best feeling of Christmas.

These are the children in the East who were abducted from a tuition class last week by the LTTE, and later released following the media exposure of the LTTE's despicable act. If Prabhakaran or his recruiting agent in the East thought of having a Christmas treat for themselves by having 22 more children to carry arms for them, what they have got is not fun, but the ignominy of exposure of their fell deed and the humiliation of releasing the children.

There are many who complain today about the spirit of Christmas being lost. Utter nonsense I would say. Just go to your favourite shopping area and you will find an abundance of Christmas engulfing you.

The festival that marks the birth of Christ begins tonight, but the Christmas shopping season has been in full swing for weeks. Shop owners have been fooling the people with Christmas sales, giving one the feeling there can never be a Happy Christmas unless you have parted with a considerable amount of your earnings in Christmas shopping. For that is the spirit of Christmas today.

With all the holiday splendour of tinseled trees, angels, reindeer, Santa, Yule logs, rich cake and slaughtered turkey, Christmas has won the day leaving Christ far behind. Christmas is the Shopkeepers' Paradise. It is the marketers' great delight. It is the big challenge for merchandising, and the dream of the advertising agent. Success in creating the Christmas spirit comes in ensuring that it is as far away from Christ as can be. So be it.

We are a free nation, and one has the right to celebrate Christmas without Christ in it. Especially, if those who preach the word of Christ, or claim to do so, have not done it well enough through the 364 other days of the year, as to make people understand the strong link between Jesus born and Christmas.

It doesn't help to come out at the end of the year and wail that Christ is not in Christmas, when all through the year they have helped take Christ out of our lives.

Christmas fun

The Christmas spirit is very much alive, glitzy and gaudy as ever. Now don't you think I'm one to spoil your Christmas fun by saying this is not the time when Christ was born; as most historians and experts on the subject do not believe that Jesus was born on December 25, with the simple reasoning that there were no pine trees in the desert around Bethlehem in Palestine, and that most of the symbolism of Christmas, from Yule logs to holly, was borrowed from the "pagan" winter holiday of Saturnalia and Yule.

I'm not interested in crossing a Jehovah's Witness on what Santa Claus hasto do with Christmas. It's enough for me that the holiday spirit is there, for everyone to share. Yeah, that's it, for everyone to share.

And by sharing I don't mean some sumptuous women who don't know how best to spend their money taking some kids from an orphanage to a five-star hotel and giving them a single Christmas treat, and packing them hastily back to the loneliness of the orphanage, till they are picked up again for the next treat, at the next Christmas.

Tuneless shouts

Sharing in the spirit of Christmas is not what happens when a business house that has won some crooked ten per cent under-the-counter deal with a State institution, send a huge hamper to the head of that institution decorated with all then baubles of Christmas, just to make sure that the same corrupt deals can be done the next year too.

Sharing is also not there when the kids of the well-to-do homes with plenty of pocket money and all the fancy gadgets of the digital age to play about with, are forced into a realizing there are other kids around who can't afford such things, and give them a Christmas treat just to ease the conscience of their parents or please their teachers, while sticking to their extravagant lifestyle all the while.

The Christmas spirit will be all over tonight with tuneless shouts of "Silent Night, Holy Night" rising over the din of firecrackers, shattering the silence of the night, supposedly to tell the world and one's neighbour that the Prince of Peace is born.

"O, come all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant" will be the raucous theme as the spirit of Christmas is celebrated right into the wee hours of the morning. It is the triumph of monetary success that makes such noise and not the triumph of sharing.