Coming home for Christmas
Trees are rushing by. The sky is painted in a sad and lonesome grey. Many travelers have brought large suitcases, some are sleeping all cuddled up in cosy jackets, others are chatting so disturbingly loud that I decide to plug my earphones in and listen to some melancholic tunes from the one and only Nina Simone. You got it — I am sitting in a train. Where I am going? I am going where most people seek shelter this time of the year. Home.
Of course, home is a very vaguely defined place. Where exactly is it? Is home the place we currently live in? Is it the place where we were born, where we were raised or where we spent most of our lives? Or is home not even a real spot on this planet, but rather an accumulation of dreams — a most unrealistic utopia? In my opinion it actually is an immensely powerful combination of memories, feelings and places really existent or just imaginary. Home is a phenomenon which can empower us to go through the toughest times, but sometimes it also fills our hearts with emptiness and the memory of a time when everything seemed so easy. The dangerous aspect of this mixture is that we never truly recall those events and emotions the way we have experienced and felt them once upon a time. That is also why this construct has the power to strengthen and to weaken us — it is an ideal that we chase on the one side, but that haunts us on the other side. Home is a resurrection. Home is a shattered mirror with thousand tiny reflections that never tell the truth. Nevertheless, especially in a romanticized, commercialized time like Christmas, we rather tend to accept that imagination without giving reflection a chance to unveil how biased we become following this overly perfect image. So we buy a ticket, pack our bags and do what we expect from ourselves.
Acknowledging this definition of home in general, we shall have a look at why huge streams of people, who usually are somewhat content and happy in their lives, make the effort to come „home“ for Christmas. I myself have to drive 10 hours, 800 kilometers to spend these days at the place I consider my home and I did not even take one second to question why exactly around Christmas. So let’s do that right now.
Watching the impressive ancient woods and mountains of Brno, Czech Republic, passing by, I have had quite a lot of time to really intrude my inner cerebrum and find out what makes me and all of my fellow home-coming travelers go on such a journey. An incredible artist, who does not have to be named to be recognized, once sang: „And so this is Christmas and what have you done?“ We all know this song and I bet you are just summing along right now because it is just such a lovely one for Christmas, right? Well, although it might have a motivational and positive message in general, this one line basically is what every individual in modern societies is terribly afraid of. How come?
We can all relate to what Christmas is all about regarding the non-commercial aspect of it. Though it is not easy to put in words, we are able to generate some sort of felt understanding, which comes close to preciseness to a relevant extent at least. It has to do with questioning your own position in this world and taking into account your influence on and importance for your nearest and dearest. During the rest of the year we are more or less successfully avoiding to think in such a manner because many of us would have to face a devastating deficit concerning our performance. However, around Christmas it gets a lot harder to escape the pressure, to hide behind a false self-observation. The lyric above is so perfectly pointing that out, it is beautiful and scary at the same time.
Now we have observed two things: Home is a resurrection performing as an ideal empowering and weakening us and around Christmas we all somehow have to ask ourselves what we recently have done for the good of others. So far, so obvious, but what can you now learn from this article? What is essential is the correlation of both phenomena.
Around the so very joyful, merry Christmas days we usually are the most haunted by the ideal of home. We come to question our lives, our motivations, we seek the sense in what we are doing and look at the dashed and divided mirror showing us a past where we either did not care about such things or somehow were able to perform way better than today. Our minds are overloaded with the burning question „Why?“. Why did everything use to be so easy and where has that leisure feeling gone? How can we come close to our ideal? Lastly, on our eternal search for answers we return to the place we associate with those feelings, which we actually never felt because — as I mentioned earlier — they are nothing but our vague impression of our actual emotional state years ago.
The last question of interest we need to ask ourselves in this case is: „Does it help?“
I think I can give a precise answer. Yes, it does help, but no, we do not find what we were looking for. Let me explain. Coming home, visiting the place of our childhood, seeing the people we love, getting in touch with all of the things symbolizing our past does have a huge impact on us. But it does not actually help us solving the problem we were facing when we started our journey. Celebrating Christmas we tend to forget about our inner discontent that initially made us come home. But not only does the overwhelming amount of impressions make us forget, it also gives us a short relief from questioning our behaviour towards others because we get the impression of bringing joy and love into our family — with the presents we bought and the smile we faked.
I do not want to extend the coverage of this article to the question if the Christmas days at home actually make us happier and give us stress relief in general. Concerning that matter there is a humungous amount of romantic comedies and family Christmas stories that will leave you with more than enough impressions.
The important finding is that this relief is not substantial, it does not last very much far behind the alcohol coma of New Year’s Eve. So after returning from the Christmas food orgy and the excesses of the last night of the old year we start pushing our doubts aside again since we just satisfied our desire for self-approval. However, as soon as the first ugly Christmas sweaters are in stores again, we start calling our parents when they could pick us up from the train station.
By now you must think of me as the human impersonation of the Grinch. Actually, I love Christmas. I love everything about it: the food, the lights in the streets, Christmassy flavours in every beverage, I even love „Last Christmas“. Of course, after spending 3 months studying in Vienna and not seeing my family, I am desperate to come home again, but I wanted to give you and me a chance to glance behind the red velvet curtains of Christmas, hopefully exposing some sort of illumination to our eyes.
Until this point it seems the article has nothing to do with politics at all. In contrast to this assumption, let me explain to you why I have actually not forgotten what this journal is all about. The search for a realization of the ideal of home is not something barely, but essentially political. Actually, it is even a fascinating thing to look at this process in politics because while it is undoubtedly present in the civil society, it is strangely absent in current politics.
As I have outlined many people are looking for a relief on their search for improvement of their own performance. However, the majority of politicians does not show any symptoms of such a process in their communication, content or actions. Right now not only the EU, but the whole world has to deal with the refugee crisis and throughout the course of the negotiations there is rarely ever a spark of humanity. The countries of Eastern Europe are still not willing to participate in a joint handling of the refugee crisis although they have received billions of Euros for the development of their infrastructures. The most diplomatic approaches trying to tackle the Syrian civil war were not fruitful and the world starts to bomb every square inch of Syrian ground without any UN permission. While we, as individuals, are so obsessively concerned with our own behaviour, we seem to almost not care at all about our behaviour as a collective larger than our family and friends.
Although it is a very important message wise men and women have spread ever since, I do not want to talk about how we should all promote peace and love among the peoples. What I want to ask you to do is less — much less: When your slightly racist grandpa wants to talk about how the refugees are going to steal all our jobs, please do not pour more wine into your glass and just let him talk. Listen to him, even if it freaks you out how someone can be so very stubborn and even if he will never change his opinion, listen to him and tell him what you think. Not only will he be happy and thankful that someone took notice of what he was saying, but also that is your chance to do better than our politicians today. Instead of irrationally judging every word from your opponent, listen to him, learn from him because the more you know about his opinion, the more likely you are to make yours become reality. Give this advice to your friends and family. Let us make Christmas 2015 a Christmas of listening to each other and maybe, just maybe we might be blessed with a miracle and actually have an impact on political culture. I bet the guy whose birthday we are celebrating would love that idea.
Merry Christmas.
