Finding merriment among the madness
A truck mowing down bystanders at a German market like it was a computer game, and now designs of carnage in central Melbourne. So this is Christmas now. It is becoming increasingly difficult to raise one’s cheer at this time of year when it seems terrorists and others with dark hearts are hellbent on painting the month of December with a big, bloody bull’s-eye.
The ghastly images of the aftermath of Monday’s deadly attack on a Berlin market are nowhere near fading, and already we must contemplate what a Christmas Day attack around Melbourne’s popular Federation Square would look like.
That plot, thankfully, appears to have been thwarted, but the threat and the fear it fosters can’t be. Will the parishioners at St Paul’s Cathedral be singing carols tomorrow or just holding their breath? Will they be there at all? Go back 12 months and we were trying to make sense of shopping lists and summer plans that seemed trite in the wake of the Paris terror attacks.
And if that weren’t enough to dent your festive joy, there was a mass killing and attempted bombing at a conference complex in San Bernardino, California.
Such atrocities have, of course, become commonplace in the United States.
But when they come in December they seem a greater affront than the daily scenes of Aleppo or famine in countries we are thankful not to live in, to the festive magic we try to conjure each year with our families.
None more so than Sandy Hook. The December 14 mass killing of 20 pupils and six teachers at the elementary school shocked the world in 2012, and it still bewilders now.
Four years on, one wonders what Christmastime is like for the people of Newtown, Connecticut.
Perhaps horrible stuff has always happened in December, and as we get older and our view of the world widens, we simply become more aware of it.
In turn it becomes increasingly important to protect the things we hold sacred about the Christmas season.
To still muster a little magic, without narrowing our focus to the extent of ambivalence to the world’s harsh realities, has become the annual challenge.
We must savour the little things; be it a well-worded toast or the glow of the Christmas tree.
And God knows it’s easier when you have laughing children, and live in a country on the far fringes of the chaos.