Lovely intangibles

So we arrive, slightly embattled, at Christmas Eve, and this year it really feels like a much-needed shot of cheer.  I think in troubled times, we gain a great deal of comfort from traditions - they give us a certain surety, and stand concrete in their reliability, so you know that after a torrid year, things are going to be ok.  Christmas traditions link us to our past and the people who shaped it, bound up in the happy memories.  I always watch Carols From Kings because it reminds me of my Grandma.  I like to open a tin of shortbread on Christmas morning, because that always seemed to happen on Christmas mornings at home.  And I always watch the film Holiday Inn on Christmas Eve - that's sort of a tradition I started myself.  What I love is that people across the globe are doing similar things, keeping their traditions and versions of Christmas alive throughout the ages, defying the difficulties that the world has thrown up this year, and delighting in those often-intangible joys.

I believe it is this warmth in the human spirit, this will to seek happiness, which so rejects the coldness of winter - both physically, and metaphorically.  In another of my favourite Christmas films, Miracle on 34th Street (the original Maureen O'Hara version obviously), a desperate Fred Gailey tries to convince love interest Doris Walker that her cold, cynical outlook on the world simply won't cut it, and that the only way you can make it through this life with heart and soul intact is if you let yourself linger on the small pleasures, however irrational or foolish they may be:

"Look Doris, some day you’re going to find out that your way of facing this realistic world just doesn’t work.  And when you do, don’t overlook those lovely intangibles.  You’ll discover they’re the only things that are worthwhile."

And really, isn't this a motto for our current time?  In a year where we've had to refocus our enjoyment and look inwards for our pleasures and our passions, do those lovely intangibles not mean more than ever?  To me they do, and I think to others they do too.  You only need to look at how early the Christmas trees went up in people's homes this year to see it - 2020 was the year that life fell back on some of the old fashioned things that we've always cherished, and often taken for granted - love, family, friends, unity, and home.

From the end of a truly tumultuous year, I as writer of this blog wish everybody reading a peaceful, loving, meaningful Christmas.