The busy world is hushed. The longest night of the year has come and gone and the sun has turned its face back towards us. Even now, the light is slowly reclaiming our days, leading us onwards towards spring, renewal and new hope. There are reasons to be cheerful, even for Christmas-phobes.
In ancient Rome, the emperor Aurelian decreed this day to be the “Dies Natalis Solis Invicti”: the Birthday of the Unconquerable Sun.
The riotous festivities of Saturnalia were built around it, with days of feasting and partying when gambling was permitted and the masters provided table service for the slaves. Like Christmas Day, it got mixed reviews. The poet Catullus called it “the best of days”, while Pliny the Younger found it all a bit taxing.
Luckily, he had a suite in his Laurentine villa to which he could retreat, “when the rest of the house is noisy with the licence of the holiday and festive cries. This way I don’t hamper the games of my people and they don’t hinder my work or studies.”
Fleeting and precious
In a face-off, this column would be Team Catullus, with dangly, Christmas tree earrings, 24-hour candlelight and almond icing. With age comes perspective, an awareness that these days are fleeting and precious and that when all those bright, lovely faces around us willingly look ridiculous playing charades, it’s about building a memory bank for those days when the sun turns away from us.
Yet I would also defend Pliny’s right to slink off to his suite. One hopes he would have made a bit of an effort to mingle, to clear a few glasses and not make a complete show of himself before disappearing, but either way, we could learn a thing or two about tolerance from him.
If Christmas is regarded as the Hadron Collider of family relationships, surely it’s because we expect all others – even subconsciously – to play by our rules.
A friend’s ageing mother-in-law used to seat herself regally at the dining table every year then promptly burst into tears, upon which a grandchild would escort her and the sherry back to the television. Everyone relaxed.
Another friend’s sibling locks himself into his house, alone, phone off, for 24 hours; a kind of modern Pliny. Unjudged.
Fantasy dinner guests
Why people expect their weird, truculent, baggage-ridden family members to morph into fantasy dinner guests for one day a year is a mystery.
Despite its disastrous PR, Christmas deprives no one of freedom of movement. Unless dinner is taking place in an actual prison, no one is forbidden to take a long walk or to sink into a pretend sleep or visit a sick neighbour. Christmas deprives no one of free will. Only controlling humans will try to do that.
Tolerance is probably the most underrated human quality. In a year that often seemed like the end of days, when the mass graves of older Yazidi women deemed too old to be Islamic State sex slaves were uncovered, the floor of a Parisian concert hall ran red with blood, and the little body of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi was washed up on a Turkish beach, the word hardly seemed equal to what we asked of it.
Battlecry for tolerance
To the cynics and the closed-minded, the extremists with ready access to a keyboard or a Kalashnikov, it is a limp, shapeless thing. But since the battle for true tolerance lies within and is born only of challenge and self-interrogation, it rarely gets heroism awards.
Ireland stood up for it, loud and proud, on a sunny, joyous day in May.
John, the security guard at Leytonstone Tube station, stood up for it a few weeks ago, shouting at a suspected terrorist: “You ain’t no Muslim bruv.”
As a battlecry for tolerance, it could hardly be bettered.
