Every year the same story. Christmas is repeated with almost obsessive accuracy, like an annual Groundhog Day: from the El Gordo raffle to Twelfth Morning, everything is the same as every year. Pure repetition. The same gestures, the same phrases, the same decoration in houses and streets, the same menu every Christmas Eve and every New Year’s Eve, the same family photos almost sitting in the same places, the same anecdote told with the same words as if we were reciting a theatrical role, the same jokes incorporated into the family lexicon, the same king’s speech, the same Christmas movies watched a thousand times, the same television bells and the same Cachitos, the same wishes and good intentions, the same concert from Vienna with its claps in the Radetzky march, the same hangover, the same embarrassment, the same roscón with the same surprise that is not surprising. Even newly minted “traditions” become part of the great Christmas repetition: the same pre-grapesthe same ‘Big Fucking Party’ rave with the same alarmism because people have a good time where it doesn’t bother them.
I’m not complaining, quite the opposite: the repetition relieves me, it comforts me that these two weeks are so foreseeable and predictable. I thought I was getting older for appreciating Christmas, until I understood that it is not emotion, illusion or nostalgia: it is above all repetition. It is its repetitive, automatic, ritual, invariable condition that I appreciate at Christmas. In a hectic and uncertain world, these few days are almost the only thing that remains. And for a few days I feel the same pleasure as when my daughters, when they were little, watched the same movie over and over again, knowing the dialogue by heart, anticipating the scares and laughing in advance at the jokes.
#Christmas #year
