'Tis the season for tension and re-hashing old scores

There are lots of kill-joy stories circulating about elderly people being upbraided for asking about the switching-on of the Christmas Lights rather than Winter Lights. And stories about singing services being cancelled for being insufficiently multi-denominational. In the US, some groups have brought successful law suits against towns whose public displays are reportedly too secular.

Rather than the usual, “the personal is the political”, it seems as if the personal experience is spreading to the political. If your family’s version of holiday spirit has usually been interpreted rather too literally (and liberally), leading to family tension and the annual re-hashing of old scores, then this is your kind of public holiday season. And, by and large, no alcohol has been required, just plain mean-spiritedness.

A friend works for a dictionary publishers and is the go-to person in many circles for linguistic niceties. She and her siblings now have their own families and gather together at her mother’s on set-piece days. A while ago, her mother was watching a TV programme and asked her, “What’s a dysfunctional family?”. In an admirable economy of words, my friend replied, “You know the way we all get on Boxing Day”; her mother nodded, “Well, dysfunctional families are like that the whole year round”.

For most of us, happiness is linked to spending non-adversarial time with friends and family. For others, it is avoidance of the festivities and everything associated with it. What can help us to retain our equanimity at this time of year? The solution varies from one individual to another, one family to another and one community to another. But one common thread that runs through observations of people who are happy is that they count their blessings (of which more in a later post).

“’Tis the season to be jolly” but there is no reason why this should be limited to brief times of the year. We flourish when we make this happiness a living, year-round project. And when we live in communities where general happiness and well-being is part of the public remit of the people whom we elect to lead us.

Copyright 2005, Tony Plant Happystance Project