A Break With Tradition

So, here we are: Boxing Day.  Another Christmas done, (except that, as I always seem to point out at this time of year , it isn't - the Twelve Days of Christmas are only just beginning), presents all opened, relatives put up with, turkey eaten. (Thankfully, I didn't have to experience the latter two - one of the benefits of a solitary Christmas is that you can abandon all those bloody 'traditions').  Anyway, I spent an extremely tranquil, low-key, Christmas Day - Director's Cut of Peckinpagh's Wild Bunch in the afternoon, (accompanied by some very good brandy), everything rounded of by Guinness Milk Stout and classic Dutch schlock Amsterdamned.  I enjoyed it so much that I did something similar today: Mad Max: Fury Road this afternoon and I'm planning a re-watch of Profondo Rosso later on.  Yet, despite all my determination to break with tradition, on Christmas Eve I found myself watching the Midnight Mass on BBC1 (I tried watching the ITV equivalent, but found it was being presented by Mylene Klass and populated with minor league celebrities - we get enough of their bollocks the rest of the year, so I changed channels).  I haven't done that in years.  I'm not religious, quite the opposite, but I felt a powerful urge to watch this.  I suspect that it was all about seeking comfort in familiarity.  Time was that - when there were only three TV channels - that everyone saw in Christmas watching this, (unless they were at the real thing in their local church, something I can't do as I'm such a sinner the water would boil in the font and I'd risk being struck by a thunderbolt as I entered the church).  When I was a kid, it just wasn't Christmas until you'd gone through this ritual.

Familiarity becomes ever more important as you get older.  Certainly that's my experience.  Like it or not, as the years pass by, we gradually lose touch with what's 'current' and 'in', not to mention 'trendy'. You realise just how much energy you are wasting trying to 'keep up' - as for familiarising oneself with new technology, well, who has the time?  And what's the point, when you know that the old ways still work?  So, in the face of an ever-changing world you can't keep up with, (even if you wanted to), you instead seek reassurance in the familiar.  It's what nostalgia is based on.  Of course, you have to be careful of this yearning for times past, as it can all too easily abused: let's face it, Bexit was, in part, the result of a nostalgia for a past that had never really existed, fueled by unscrupulous right-wing politicians.  But, to return to the point, this yearning for familiarity is particularly powerful at Christmas: we all seem doomed to continually try and recreate the Christmases of our childhoods, or rather, our inaccurate memories of what we think they were like.  I know that I did.  For quite a while after I turned my back on family Christmases in favour of going solo, I tried to replicate aspects of those Christmases of yore, in what I ate, when I ate it, what I watched, etc.  But it was pointless, it could never be the same.  Besides, there was a reason I stopped participating in those Christmases: all too often they were crap, wracked by arguments and petty disputes which rendered them utterly miserable.  I yearned for them to end.  So, I gradually shed those vestiges of Christmases past and started just taking the season as it came. I've enjoyed it a lot more since I shrugged off tradition.  Which makes this year's lapse into tradition in the form of the TV midnight mass all the more puzzling.  That said, I did enjoy it - although that might have something to do with the glass of whiskey which accompanied it.