It’s that time of year again where people go dilly

THIRTEEN days and it will be Christmas. A time where one receives wanted and unwanted gifts. A time where one has to keep smiling at the dinner table while you despise half the people in the room.

If we only knew the behind-the-scenes dramas that take place each year. But somehow we pull it off. And pity those who are left to do the cleaning afterwards.

We fall for this every year. We eat too much, drink too much and spend way more than we can afford.

Half the nation go on a silly diet or join a gym in the new year.

If this is not enough, we go into overdraft so we can buy drinks for the New Year’s party.

In fact, if some of us were raided, the cops might think we were running a shebeen.

People drink and drive. Too many people get hurt or die because of drunk driving.

After all the spending on things we don’t really need, how dare the car guard ask me for R2? (The fact that he did not drop your bottle of R2 600 Irish whiskey you bought at Norman GoodFellows while carrying it to your car, does not count for anything.)

I wonder if shops play special music that makes shoppers go overboard and spend like they do. We turn brain dead. And in all of this, I ask myself: “Where does the birth of Jesus fit in?” I mean, after all, it is the celebration of the birth of Christ, not so?

We are so detached from the real purpose and meaning.

We spend a minute amount of time reflecting on Him. It is no longer a holy day. It is a commercialised event where business can make a killing.

We have lost our religion. We talk but we don’t walk the talk.

I pity those who, after all these years, compose a new year’s resolution list. The “to-do” or “not-to-do” list. As humans, we are set in our ways. Change is a strange unknown place most of us would rather avoid.

Or we become so fanatical that going to gym turns into a military boot camp. And we give up.

We will wake up in January 2018 and realise it is just another day. Same old, same old.

But by then money is too tight to mention. School fees, school clothing and so on and so on will pull us back to reality.

To think of the amount of food that is going to be wasted kills me. All the while where it could have gone to somebody in need.

Let us all be more mindful in 2018. A chain (society) is only as strong as it’s weakest link.

In spite of having homeless people in the city, Cape Town was once again voted tops in the world. There are opportunities here that can be used towards empowering us too.