With Geraldine Doogue

It’s where our best, brightest and funniest have their say.

Have you noticed the month of December has become social central for millions of us, far beyond Christmas-time itself? It’s not my imagination, surely. The pace of engagement and human interaction in the communities I know seems to pick up exponentially throughout the month more than in previous times. So let us rejoice and be glad, I say!

Wherever I go, the venues are heaving. Laughter proliferates. Exuberance is the order of the day. The enthusiasm for being alive is infectious, the joie de vivre more palpable, more reliably expressed, than at other times of the year.

Yes, I know, everyone has gatherings throughout any average year but look around throughout December. The carnival-like camaraderie is of another order. So many of us partake: whole restaurant economies are surely kept alive by the intense sociability.

Hopefully it’s not just a city phenomenon. Recently I saw Grace Brennan, who kick-started the Buy From

The Bush online success story, and she noted the lack of an end-of-year school event in her regional area – quite a loss. I also presume Christmas rituals in bushfire areas are more vulnerable this year especially – an extra tragedy.

I acknowledge these December shenanigans probably unleash too much alcohol into some individuals’ and families’ lives. Plus December gatherings can be hazards, where bad behaviour emerges like untended weeds. The usual inhibitions that govern conduct among colleagues can dissolve as fast as Prosecco bubbles, scuttling all the codes of discipline that operate in the normal environment: sexual harassment cases and wrecked careers instead can be the result.

Nevertheless, this underlying increase in social contact really matters. When experts are asked to distil the secret of longer, better lives, they say: stop smoking first of all, and second, make regular social contact. Movement with social contact is the glittering prize!

But all the various other options for longevity – cycling, climbing, high-intensity workouts, 120 minutes of brisk walking a week – pale beside this nominally more prosaic activity. That is, staying connected above all. And not necessarily in heroic ways. Just living within the community among others, not in splendid isolation: it’s not rocket science.

Another verity of public health wisdom about thriving communities is the expectation of accidental social contact. Even knowing, the experts say, that you’ll run into Mrs Aggravation more than Mr Nice on the street is part and parcel of regular, healthy human interaction that gives vital ballast to our lives. It limits the searing impact of isolation. Increasingly, authorities are ramping up their warnings about loneliness being a killer. That is why the local coffee shop matters so much. Pubs used to play more of this role, especially for men.

But back to December frolics. Two key commentators – Hugh Mackay from Australia and sociologist Richard Sennett from the US – suggest this reinvigorated end-ofyear socialising is all part of a good trend that we may have overlooked in all the confusion of the times: namely re-tribalising. Years ago, Hugh told me that despite concerns about the internet revolution creating more anomie and distance between people, he foresaw it facilitating this re-tribalising: boosting natural tendencies. He had been concerned, during the 1990s, that we were becoming extremely fragmented in our social arrangements but he gradually changed his mind, charting efforts to reconnect in different but valuable ways.

Of course the online world can prompt the reverse – tribalising along toxic, anti-social lines, but technology makes reaching out for social contact vastly easier.

Richard Sennett, in books like Together and Building And Dwelling, predicted almost a generation ago that urban existence fostered new links between people, stripped of the predictable familial and geographic bonds of rural areas. To his and others’ surprise, he found these newer links could be even more valuable, more open to fresh experiences, more tolerant than the supposedly more enduring country ones. I witness something like this possibility in the multiplicity of gatherings on show in December these days.

Whether or not you agree with me, I invite you to sample some of them vicariously. Or better still, organise your own. And then revel in the spirit of the great Jewish exhortation, l’chaim: to life! AWW