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Fri 23 Dec, 2005 08:19 pm
The Irish Emigrant December 16, 2005
by Cormac MacConnell
Tinseltime! It is the best of times. It is the worst of times. It is mortally spiritual
at its core and spiritually mortal too. It is maudlin and it is uplifting. It is
the end of one invisible year of all our lives and the beginning of another. It
mutates subtly yet fundamentally remains the same. It makes us happy and it makes
us sorrowful. There is a chill in its weathers yet it warms the heart. It is the
chesty chuckle and the tear in the eye at one and the same moment. It is the waif
of a Child lying in straw in a shed. It is all the iconic images of Kings and Angels
and a bright Star and animals frozen with wonder in their eyes. It is church bells
ringing in celebration.
It is Come All Ye Faithful and Silent Night and Oh Holy Night. It is the rustle
of bright packaging. It is the amazing movement of a huge forest of tiny conifers
into the houses of a nation. It is a compression of Life at its highest and lowest
points. It is Christmas Past and Christmas Present and Christmas Yet To Come. It
is carol singers on the doorsteps, Midnight Masses, the aromatics of dying wax candles
and pine needles on the carpet and Santa Claus late in the night and mothers slaving
in the kitchen to produce meals that nobody is ever quite ready for when they are
eventually served. It is Tinseltime. ThereâÂ?ÂTs nothing wrong with it.
There is just about everything right about it. It blazes out of our darkest and
coldest season like that mythical star. Herds of electric reindeer now blaze in
Irish back gardens, even on the ridge tiles of sleeping towns, bringing brightness
to the bleakness. Regiments of Santa Claus figures peer out of windows, or from
behind garden shrubbery, or from bright shop windows. They bear testament to the
fact that there can still be a touch of magic in this world. Fairy lights wink and
blink and flash in sequence to truly create a fairyland. They have a hypnotic effect.
Even cynics widen their smiles at Tinseltime. Even these most hardened cynics, in
the most beautiful transformation of Tinseltime, always answer the Santa Claus Question
from seven-year olds the same way. Yes, they say truthfully, there really is a Santa
Claus. And there is too. There is no other time and season of the year when legend
and myth is so convincingly converted into a great and genuine reality.
It is the element of Tinseltime that is hallmarked gold in days when the joy of
giving, sharing, celebrating, soften all the hard wintry edges. If there was no
Tinseltime on the calendar we would have to invent it. You could claim that it is
nowadays the consumer society gone crazy. You could claim that it is Ripoff Ireland
operating at peak efficiency. You could claim that. You could argue that the real
message of the season - the birth of a Messiah - is forgotten and lost in the shopping
craze, in the swirling of the spending throngs, in all the minor and major madnesses
of TinseltimeâÂ?ÂTs excesses. You could argue that very convincingly and in some courts
you would win the case hands down. But Tinseltime has a broader brief than that.
Sons and daughters, as grown men and women, come back in their millions, all over
the world, to the hearths where they were born. They become, if only for a few hours,
the children they were only the Tinseltime before yesterday. They wear eyes as young
as those of their own children. In some alchemy of the mind all the family ghosts,
the old ones gone, are very close to the new generations during the flaring surreality
of one or two winter days. Families, despite strains and creaks, rebond themselves
again, add new dimensions, accept new members, get ready to march on into another
invisible year with all its challenges, joys, sorrows, celebrations and triumphs.
At least one day, at the heart of Tinseltime, is for that family, and that family only, the front door closed against
all the world outside. And that is special too. Tinseltime is of holly and jolly,
of strange elves and our even stranger selves, of merry and berry, of mistletoe
and twinkletoe, of wine and brightly coloured twine, of peace and goodwill, of mince
pies and children's eyes, of all that goes with all of that. Tinseltime touches
the softest and warmest places of all our hearts. It brings out the best in the
most of us the most of a special time. That truly makes it an eighteen carat golden
season rather than just a time of cheap tinsel. I wish all of you, wherever you
are, the very best of it.
Submitted by Mike Turner
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