Do you feel it? Well…? DO YOU FEEL IT?
What?
The Christmas Spirit, of course!
…
But, what IS IT … really? I looked it up. The first result were “News results” which I wasn’t really interested in. The second result was a link to eHOW.com and I figured it was probably my best bet for the purposes of this article, because the other options were in no particular order: “Christmas Spirit Shop”, Latest results (tweets included), “The True Spirit of Christmas” by John MacArthur (sermon? or religious message? in any case, a discourse based on the bible – not what I needed), and then a link to WikiAnswers.
None of these webpages gave me what I needed to write this post.
The eHow article gives 11 steps on how to “get into the Christmas spirit” and includes things such as:
- playing Christmas music
- saying hello to everyone you meet on the street
- decorate your home for the season
- give to charities
- volunteer your time
It’s a wonderful article if you are intending to get INTO the spirit of Christmas, but what if you’re just talking about it, describing it, discussing it? So I decided to write my own perspective on what this Christmas Spirit really is.
For me, the Christmas Spirit is a persistent feeling of unadulterated joy with an almost uncontrollable urge to help people all the time; always smiling, always feeling like singing, always feeling like saying “Hello” to everyone you meet. (Is there a song with lyrics similar to that?). At times, it has made me want to mumble “Bah humbug!” even though I think Ebenezer Scrooge is one of fairytales’ most horrid characters. It can feel overdone if you haven’t actually felt it yourself. The result is either that you gain the feeling yourself, or you grumble about it “Bah humbug!”
In Jamaica, at Christmas, a breeze picks up and blows fresh and clean and cool over the whole island. Sometimes it comes in as early as November, sometimes (as my Mother tells me this year is like) it comes later on. You step outside, and a light breeze lifts your hair, dusts your eyelashes, stirs your skirt, cools you … and you feel like smiling. I miss Jamaican Christmas’ because it seems as if even the weather is cheery. And while I wish it were like that all year round, the experience of it is enough to make sure you enjoy the season and gives you something to look forward to the following year.
It’s not just the weather either, Sorrel (a local Christmas drink) is available everywhere, everyone is carting around heavy Christmas cake in one form or another, carols can be heard from just about every radio in town, everybody has some form of decoration on their homes (mostly lights there, since the expense of other decorations is wasted on the thieves who would relieve home-owners of their fare), less cursing … and just about everybody has a smile on their face.
“Mawnin’ Miz Moore. Howdy doo?”
This year, my spirit is hampered somewhat with events recently past and some yet to come. And while I try not to dwell on what has not yet come to pass, the shadow of April and the following months lean heavily on my Christmas Spirit. We put up our own Christmas tree and it looks even better than it did last year. That has helped us both, I think, to get into some semblance of a Christmas Spirit. And so I leave you with the image of our tree and a wish for a Happy HAPPY Christmas Day (whether you celebrate it or not, it should be happy). I’ll see you all on the other side of the holidays with more stuff (and maybe even some photos).
Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Enjoy!
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