Christmas and Common Humanity

A quick drink with our family and friends, a quick and casual "romantic" relationship that we know lacks depth in feeling or time, are more the norm for our lives now than was once the sad exception.

If Christmas provides some means of bringing people together, of creating even no more than a passing illusion of some sort of social togetherness and common humanity, it is more than worthwhile for those reasons alone.

Perhaps, in a world that has become so fiercely negative towards social virtues and so overwhelmingly permissive in individual self-indulgence, we might ask whether the world would be better without even the largely secular, market-oriented Christmas that we have now. We have so little in which we can rejoice together, in which we can feel even the most superficial brother- and sisterhood, that the answer must be "no."

So let's keep whatever little we still have and see whether, perhaps even as early as next Christmas, we might - just might - have just a little more.