We hope someone brings all our dear readers some figgy pudding this week as Nanaimo celebrates Christmas.
Most of us will enjoy the next few days as a time to connect with families, friends and loved ones, carry on traditions, give and receive gifts and celebrate the yule season. We can observe religious ceremony if we like, or none at all.
The holiday season represents all of those activities, and it is also a reward – the culmination of a month’s worth of shopping, decorating, preparing, hustling and bustling. We can breathe a sigh of relief once we see that Dad did like the tie we picked out; the Christmas tree didn’t catch fire; the turkey turned out moist.
These next few days will be important to our well-being. As much as we tried to keep a brave face in mall parking lots and at store checkouts this past month, we couldn’t help but be guilty of a little grumbling and grinching now and again. We got through the stresses and pressures of the season, and Christmas came, just the same as it always does, and certainly we deserve to take a moment to enjoy it.
Christmas is partly about consumerism, and perhaps that’s OK on occasion. We don’t necessarily like the idea of crumpling up reams of unrecyclable gift wrap and stuffing it into garbage bags, but it doesn’t mean we’ve sacrificed our values – we’ve just decided that family values are more important on Christmas morning. And if we want to try to do better, well, that’s what new year’s resolutions are for.
We wish all our readers a merry Christmas. There is happiness in our holiday hearths and also in our hearts and all around us, and it is just a matter of hugging it close to our chests. May we all find the meaning of Christmas, whatever that might be.