LIGHTS AND SHADOWS

The past three mornings, I’ve been woken up by the sound of someone singing All I want for Christmas… is you. About a sofa. Not a person. Furniture. Yes… the season of Christmas ads has begun, and DFS are joining Argos at the front of the queue. There have been selection boxes and Christmas puddings and mince pies and Christmas blend tea and coffee in the shops for weeks now – some of them with “best before” dates long before December 25th. The Christmas lights are there, stretched high above the heads of Coleraine shoppers, and the tree has already arrived in Ballymena. In a mixture of organisation and mild alarm, I bought my Christmas cards today, even though I felt silly for doing so before the clocks go back for winter. And yet, although our Christmases have never been so organised, so carefully thought out, are we losing out on some essential ingredient of the seasons of our past?

The Christmases, and the seasons, of the past are holograms on the glass surface of nostalgia. Of course they probably weren’t perfect at all. There were people then who didn’t like their presents too – people who were offended because their card arrived late – people who were impossible to buy for – people who refused to eat the Brussels sprouts. But it didn’t all go on for months. It wasn’t difficult to find a birthday card in October because the Christmas cards had taken over almost all the shelf-space. We looked forward to the seasonal treats of mince pies and Christmas pudding precisely because they were in evidence only for those few weeks of the year. It’s not just global warming that has the seasons mixed up now: it’s the desire for instant, constant gratification. This morning I saw Hot Cross Buns sitting next to the Christmas cake in one shop, and fake tan beside the winter flu remedies in another. We seem to have to have everything that’s good about each season, all year, every day. There’s no such thing as looking forward to something any more: it’s like the child who opens every window of the advent calendar on the first day, and then cries because he finds out there are no sweets left. He’s sickened himself, and he’s got nothing left to anticipate. The sweetness of not having to wait a moment longer lies heavy as disappointment in his stomach, the taste turning to ashes in his mouth…

But the problem with Christmas doesn’t just seem to be that it starts too early. It’s what we’re told to find important, too. A new sofa – chemically produced “seasonal scents” – the perfect indoor and outdoor decorations – “essential partywear”. When the song All I want for Christmas… is you was written, you can be sure that it wasn’t about a household object. It reads as a love song, and only a very bizarre person falls in love with a sofa. One of the concluding scenes of the feel-good, if rather saccharine, Christmas film Love Actually features a very memorable performance of this song, as the climax of a mildly twee, mildly touching, interlocking pattern of love stories – not one of them featuring a woman in love with a piece of furniture. And yet we seem to be living in a world, just now, where we’re encouraged to set our hearts and happiness on such things. It’s like the people who say they know Christmas is coming “because they’ve seen that Coca Cola ad on TV for the first time this year”. You know the one. Holidays are coming… The irony is all the more striking given that Santa Claus, as we know him, in his red suit, was originally the product of a Coca Cola advertising campaign. This morning, in a local department store, I noticed an impressive display of Christmas trees and other decorations, set in the context of several mocked-up mini living rooms. In one of these settings, a family of wide-eyed children had gathered, gazing open-mouthed at the fully decorated tree, below which a tiny miniature railway was set, the train whizzing around until the batteries failed. Something among these decorations was playing carols. As the mechanism clicked on to Silent Night, something also clicked in the children, and they began singing along. Softly, quietly, with something of wonder in their voices. The eldest took the hand of her smallest brother. There was something very serene, innocent about the moment… and then the recording clicked on to Jingle Bells, the girl dropped her brother’s hand, they wandered away, and the moment was broken. And yet isn’t it strange – that funny little moment of magic, in the middle of a crowded shop, in October, when those four children suddenly heard the carol they knew best and remembered how to respond to it? Maybe there’s still just a little bit of Christmas spirit left, deep amid the packaging and the hard sell.

Later, though, I was reminded that it’s not Christmas at all, but Autumn still – and it was a group of birds which had the sense of seasonal adjustment that we, as people, seem to have lost. Across the fields from one of the roads linking Coleraine to the sea, there’s a small group of pure white Bewick’s swans. What’s slightly wonderful about this is that the same, and neighbouring, fields were used by the birds just exactly a year ago, for about a month, as a staging post on their Autumn migration voyage. I’ve been watching out for them for a week or two now, and seeing them this afternoon brought back the memories of their arrivals and departures last Autumn. Further towards the coast, I saw some more of the birds fly over in a v-shaped flotilla, ready to join the flock, hooting and honking with the joy of reaching landfall after their long journey. In the filtered autumn sunshine from behind the banks of light grey cloud, the white of their feathers was touched here and there with silver. These are the lights of October, surely, rather than the twinkling fairylights of midwinter and Christmastime?

October also makes me think of a friend I lost, seven years ago next week. This was a friend whom I never actually met – someone I got to know through an online messageboard, through discussions on politics and books and music and film and life. We corresponded by e-mail for several years in an unlikely link between two people who were several generations and many thousands of miles apart. My friend lived in Minnesota, and used to write about the birds and squirrels and bears which came to his backyard for food. He had vehement opinions about American and world politics and was not afraid to speak his mind. We shared a love for many American writers, from Emily Dickinson to Anne Tyler, F Scott Fitzgerald to Carol Shields. When I got to know him, he was in remission, but his cancer returned, aggressively, just before the summer of 2002. He fought hard. I remember in those last months e-mailing a few anecdotes which might make him laugh, or poems which might bring comfort. I still miss sending him his Christmas card – I remember writing the address each year, and trying to imagine the different world of snowdrifts and brown bears into which my envelope was travelling.

The world, in 2009, is a strange and shrinking one. The seasons are telescoping themselves into one and the continents are drifting together in a virtual world in which anyone we meet in any country or any timezone is just a few mouse-clicks away from us at any time of the day or night. We can buy mince pies and hot cross buns on the same day, and feel the need for a suntan in winter just as much as in summer. The clocks might change with the equinox, but, lacking the sense of times and patterns of the migrating birds above us, we don’t seem to see the lengthening shadows as our signals any more. Our friends are no longer just the people we see face-to-face: they’re also the people we talk to on the other side of the world – the people we may never even meet, but whom we’re still very capable of missing when they’re not there any more. The Christmas cards I bought today show a shadowed monochrome landscape lit sparsely by a tiny string of coloured fairylights. Tiny white glittering dots whisper of a light covering of snow on the ground. In the middle of the accelerating bustle of the Christmas shopping frenzy, the world slowed down, just for a moment, for the girl to take her brother’s hand as the children sang Silent Night. In the dark of a society where Christmas becomes just another money-making opportunity instead of a season which reminds us what goodwill really means, maybe these little moments are the pinpricks of light which can give us faith in human nature – in each other. If we ignore these things, what are we left with? A world in which we sing love songs to our furniture, take our dreams from a Christmas catalogue, and lay our tables full of processed, frozen food. And in a world like that, surely anything left which is good or life-affirming should not be left forgotten, like an ephemeral treat bound by a best-before date.