My mother died very recently so I found the Doctor Who special The Last Christmas (SPOILERS HEREAFTER) particularly poignant, and Dannys dream soldier working to save Clara left me with a simultaneous heavy and uplifted heart. People live on in the memories of those they have touched in life, as well as in their good works. (As an atheist and artist, I have always found that fact a great and enduring comfort, my passport to immortality and/or a kind of life after death. ) The tangerine was also rich in metaphor for me, as it recalled a story that my mum used to tell of Christmas during The Great Depression, where they counted themselves lucky when their parents were able to gift their large brood of children with a single orange each. This Christmas, we busted my mother-out-of-law out of hospital for the day (she has cancer) and were able to give her a traditional Christmas, in her terms, which sat weirdly at odds with our own eclectic mix of enthusiastically blasphemous fandom evolved traditions. It mattered not to her that the Chrissy tree (a discarded one that I rescued specifically for seasonal photoshoots) was entirely decorated with Iron Man action figures, or that our selection of festive filksongs owe more to the Cryptkeeper than to Mr Claus. (Shes cheerfully hard of hearing and just hums along to the familiar tunes anyway.) So the chance to gather during a holiday, free of the mundane structures of work beyond the home (plenty to be done in it!), is something in itself worth the sharing, completely independent of the considerable fa-la-la-la-lah baggage that the season has always lugged around in its sack. Definitely bigger on the inside than the outside!
Posted on: Fri, 26 Dec 2014 21:47:24 +0000
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