It was going to be Christmas day in an hour’s time, and I’d been thinking of something meaningful to say, and I decided to touch on a tradition I started around two years back of buying Christmas cards from a colleague of mine who likes to hand paint them.
My former colleague has a particular talent, or at least she has a particular effect on me. She is a 36-year-old woman who has the ability to make her inner child come through. It was just something about her that made you forget that she was a grown woman. Couldn’t get angry with her because it would be like getting angry with a wobbly child that needed a hug.
Anyway, she’s managed to get that part of her personality shining through in her artwork, and I always get a sense of tummy-tickling delight when looking at her artwork. I buy her cards and send them out in the hope of sharing the positive emotions that I get from viewing someone’s inner child.
Christmas has been particularly poignant for sending out her “cute cards.” If you think about it, the magic of Christmas comes from awakening your inner child. For one day of the year, you forget all the nasty things and the nastiness in the human race to celebrate what we once had. Christmas should be that one day of the year when your heart becomes open to people you meet and deal with. There are kids that you want to squeeze for the sake of it, and Christmas is that time when you should want to squeeze the people around you.
The man whose birthday we celebrate on 25 December every year is supposed to have come down to earth to bring humanity closer together. He was a man born in the circumstances so poor that, in the modern context, you’d say he was a welfare case. Yet, two-thousand years later, we call him the king-of-kings. He was a man who made “love” the centre of his teaching, and instead of using his power to rule the universe, he chose to hang out with the dregs of society. You could say that he loved humanity the way a child does before it’s taught to hate and is given a false sense of superiority based on superfluous things.
So, on Christmas day, we need to have a portion of the man whose birthday we celebrate. Have an open heart to your fellow man. When I look at the “cute cards” I order, I think of good things like marshmallows and fluffy pillows for at least one day of the year, which gives me the energy to deal with the usual misery of daily life like bills, poverty, plagues and so on for the remaining 364 days.
So, I wish everyone a Merry Christmas filled with happy thoughts. Buying myself the “cute cards” helped me think good things, and I urge everyone to look for their inner child for at least that one day in the calendar year.
A version of this article first appeared at beautifullyincoherent.blogspot.com