The True Meaning of Christmas

[Blogged this a few years ago on an old site; hasn’t dated in my head so thought I’d resurrect it…]

No, not that true meaning. I mean the true meaning of all the untrue meaning stuff that we actually spend most of our time doing, even if we say we’re only interested in the true meaning stuff. I mean the chestnuts-roasting, lords-a-leaping, tills-a-ringing stuff.

Let’s start with the music. For the ‘season of good cheer’, the music sure is depressing. Driving home for Christmas would make you take your hands off the wheel. Have yourself a merry little Christmas? I’d love to but I’m listening to your miserable song.

Then there’s the shopping. Christmas, of course, is the pagan feast of shopping. If you take shopping out of the non-religious Christmas, you’re left with not much more than a glorified Sunday dinner and some tinsel.

And what about the Christmas fantasy itself, the one that’s used to shift all those products, the romantic Victorian-German-Hollywood-Coca-Cola-corporation daydream that’s conjured up through our songs and movies and ads and decorations? It’s a beautiful fantasy, but a fantasy it is. The ‘ones we used to know’ – but did we ever really know those Christmases, even as kids? Wasn’t it just a dream even back then? It’s a pass-the-parcel of memory – nostalgia wrapped in nostalgia wrapped in nostalgia.

So I confess to being more of a stocking-half-empty person when it comes to Christmas. Yet, if I’m honest, there is another leg to this turkey.

I may be a cynic but I’m also a collaborator. I bought the Michael Bublé album. I enjoy festive trips to the shops. I love romantic Victorian-German-Hollywood-Coke corporation fantasies, fantastical though they may be. And I know a hundred ways to eat a piece of Christmas cake.

The truth is that Christmas is a whole lot of different things. It’s life, compressed. It’s ridiculous. It’s also brilliant. And it’s happy. And it’s sad.

I guess the non-religious Christmas is a still a spiritual metaphor. By celebrating it we put a light into the dark winter. The light shines for a while but still the winter goes on, as we always know it will. And so that strange melancholy that runs through Christmas – a yearning for a light that might never go out. They stopped shooting in the trenches for Christmas 1914. But they started right up again. We’re not where we long to be, but we hope.

Which brings us round to the true meaning of the true meaning of Christmas after all.

Merry Christmas to you all, friends. May all your cracker jokes be funny. May all your presents come with gift receipts. And may all your mince pies be gently warmed in a hot oven for 10-15 minutes.

The Bourne Explanation

If my favourite film was the film I’d watched most times, my favourite film would be The Bourne Supremacy. It’s the second of the trilogy, the one where his girl gets shot in India at the start. Wife and me watched it again the other night; disturbingly, it’s ten years old this year.

Bourne and the lovely Marie think they’re ‘off the grid’ and forgotten by the CIA bad eggs who wanted, in The Bourne Identity, their malfunctioning programmed-assassin dead. But Bourne still can’t remember his old life and he’s tormented by half a memory of one particular murder he carried out which he thinks holds the key to something big. When a Russian hitman turns up in his summer wear and tries to kill them, Bourne reaches for those fake passports and heads off to put a stop to this once and for all.

Every time I watch this film I find another reason to love it. This time round, it was the way the locations tell the story. After that short and sweaty opening sequence in Goa, the film is set in Berlin and Moscow. A dark past, an ambiguous present, loneliness and anonymity – those cities are Bourne, those cold streets, those frozen rivers and nightmare-sized apartment blocks. Matt Damon doesn’t have many lines in this film. He doesn’t need them.

The denouement of Supremacy is particularly brilliant. Not the smug victory that closes most Hollywood action films, but a quiet moment of truth-telling and compassion, just as gripping as the frenetic car chase that precedes it.

The Bourne films are not exactly treatises of non-violence, but they aren’t far off. He’s on a search for redemption from his past sins and on the way, exposing the corruption of the powers that be. He was given a ‘licence to kill’ by his abusive spymasters but unlike his British counterpart, Bourne is trying to break the cycle of violence. In The Bourne Ultimatum, when he asks the goon sent by the CIA to kill him, ‘do you even know why you’re supposed to kill me?’, the question, surely, is directed at the wayward post-9/11 foreign policies of the US. Did America know what it was doing in all those violent, far-flung escapades anymore? Had it ever known?

Bourne is an archetype, a bit like another man in black, Johnny Cash (or how we imagine Johnny Cash): a man on the run, fighting his demons and the world around him while trying find his way into the light. And who isn’t? We’re all driving through the night to Berlin, in search of clues to who we are, what we should be sorry for, who is trying to screw with us, what we can hope for. For a brainwashed super-soldier assassin with amnesia, he’s pretty universal.

All the more reason to get excited that Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon have announced there’ll be another one released in 2016! Cue ‘Bourne again/re-Bourne’ puns. Cue the duh-duh-duh-duh music and a nice new short-back-and-sides. If it even gets close to Supremacy, I’ll be happy.