Christmas: how to use – 12/25/2023 – Vera Iaconelli

For happy families, commemorative dates tend to be the enviable celebration of their success. But, as Tolstoy said, happy people are so similar to each other that we have little to reflect on them, after all, in a good team you don’t change. In the case of unhappy people, with their varied ways of cultivating suffering, the same dates become a confirmation of the failure of relationships with the people who are most significant to us. They tend to be the lemon in the wound.

Between the extremes, there remain families in which there are few affinities and the party goes down like a raisin in the middle of the food: it would be better not to have it, but, being inescapable, it is possible to swallow it quickly or push it to the corner of the plate.

And so Christmas continues as an X-ray of family relationships, a photograph that reveals each year the state of this nucleus that is sold as happy, but experienced as an obstacle course. You cannot change decades of harmful relationships in one night, which makes heartburn inevitable, but there is a factor that can be recalculated.

Christmas went from a religious festival to a completely commercial event, losing any allusion to its origin. Does any child still remember that the birth of Jesus is celebrated? The thing comes down to the figure of Santa Claus, invented and shoved down our throats by the Coca-Cola industry. And it leads to an exchange of gifts that moves the economy while putting the middle class in debt and excluding the proletariat. As Freud said, money is libido and, therefore, spending reveals the degree of investment in the project, which can be either the response to a genuine desire, or the most alienated of gestures.

To push irrational consumption at the worst time to spend — followed by vacations, IPVA, IPTU and the instability of those who are not CLT —, there must be advertising. The emotional appeal induces us to associate the magic of Christmas with food, clothes and gifts, making the consumerist wheel turn. The aura that the propaganda gives to the event only increases the abyss between the idealized imaginary scene and the real family that has to be faced. The one who in the last 364 days used every subterfuge to avoid having to meet.

One can talk about Christmas as the heaviest festival for most families without ignoring those from other religions, since the date is so detached from its original vocation that it is almost impossible for Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and others to get rid of the ritual of exchanging goods with which you have become associated. But the further away from the false expectations referred to the date, the greater the chance that it will just be a family dinner, more or less pleasant, and not an affective anatomy class.

Since modernity, the family has been a mix of company and bunker capable of doing anything to defend its own to the detriment of others, but also of cutting into the flesh of anyone who threatens it from within. The compulsory relationships that the family creates and its closure to the world create the logic that leads to its subjective downfall. Therefore, the chance of feeling good in this compulsory undertaking full of guilt and false expectations is greatly reduced. The more open it is to the world, the more airy it is in respecting singularities, the closer the family gets to elective friendships without blood ties. The title of family, if we still want to use that term, would be the group that, sharing a common history —recent or transgenerational—, was based on recognition and respect for differences, mutual care and openness to the collective.

Jesus, when asked about his family, would have replied that his mother and brothers are all those who hear the word of God and carry it out. As the word of God is an intimate matter, and not a monopoly of churches’ preaching, I prefer to believe, for my benefit, that even good-natured atheists would be welcome in the family of Jesus.

Merry Christmas.

LINK PRESENT: Did you like this text? Subscribers can access five free accesses from any link per day. Just click the blue F below.