It’s Christmas. Be cheerful despite a hard year

This is a time for togetherness and gratitude, and it's only in that spirit that we can take on 2016.

COMMENT

One must take the time to fully appreciate the weirdness of singing or listening to some of the popular Christmas songs. “Let It Snow,” for example, is a cheery little tune, which makes it fun to sing, but it doesn’t snow here. In fact, it’s actually kind of hot, especially when it doesn’t rain. No snow for Malaysians this year again, though we’d have another kind of problem entirely if it suddenly began snowing here every December.

But let me first wish you a Merry Christmas if you are celebrating the occasion, and Happy Holidays if you’re enjoying the well-deserved day off after a long and hard year. Yes, this has been a hard year for many of us. What with scandals and internal strife, and protests in the streets and chaos in the malls, 2015 will be remembered as a trying year indeed.

2016 does not look any better. In fact, many are shuddering at the thought of the coming year, which will bring with it a raft of cost-of-living hikes even as the Najib administration deals with an undervalued ringgit and plummeting crude oil prices. This seemingly perfect one-two punch of economic uncertainty has already led to discussions of budget revisions, given that some of the money was to be generated through the sale of crude oil.

Even as the Greater KL plan takes shape and Malaysia is set to go through a transformation of sorts physically, Malaysians are down in the dumps. It doesn’t help that the public’s pleas for some economic leniency from the government has met with derision from ministers whose pieces of advice are as bizarre as singing songs about white Christmases. For example, “Wake up earlier if you want to avoid the tolls” because, it seems, we wake up so late that we all get caught in a jam together. It’s amazing how a having VIP motorcade can cloud your view of what trying to get to any meeting on time in KL on a weekday is like.

But I feel I’ve had my fill of sour grapes for now. Christmas season used to be a time to look forward to, a season of togetherness so that families and communities could get closer to each other, a season for celebration, and a season to be grateful for what we have. And perhaps, through all the pain we have gone through as a society this year, we have lost sight of the little things we should be grateful for.

So I am grateful this Christmas, for friends and family. I am grateful for my work, for the ability to talk to all of you. I am grateful for all the delicious food you can find only in Malaysia. I am grateful for my friends who have been married happily this year, and I am grateful for the new friends I have made. I am grateful to live alongside those near and dear to me, and to be able to do so in peace.

My fellow Malaysians, next year will be hard. There is no mistaking that. But there is only so much we as common people can do. So we’ll have to do it together, and we’ll have to learn to be grateful for the little things that make us who we are as a people. So here’s to Christmas, as merry as we have the heart to make it, and to a new year full of uncertainty that we can get through only if we’re together.