Celebrating Christmess in Malaysia

by Dean Johns

http://www.malaysiakini.com

This is Kerismas

I mentioned in a column entitled ‘Merry Kerismas’ back in 2007 that I’ve long been hesitant to make too much of a fuss about Christmas in the Malaysian context, as members of the UMNO-BN regime might perceive it as a provocative act of attempted religious proselytisation.

And, while on the one hand I couldn’t care less what they think, I’d hate to provide these criminals with another excuse to hypocritically pose as defenders of Islam. In any event, in all honesty I have to admit to some doubts about Christmas myself, or at least about the degree to which this allegedly sacred festival has gradually come to so grate on many of us as more a celebration of greed than of creed.

As I recall from ‘Christmas jeer’, an unpublished rant I wrote 10 years or so ago, even as a kid I found Christmas to be not so much merry as myrrhy. Soured, as I’m deeply ashamed to admit, by the fact that it somehow it never lived up to my childish – if not outright – infantile dreams of unlimited treats and presents.

For months leading up to the event my acquisitive fantasies would grow increasingly frenzied until come the actual day I’d be virtually sick with unfulfillable longings. No gift on earth could have satisfied my expectations, and none, as welcome as so many of them were, ever did.

Not that I didn’t try hard to conceal my disappointment, so ashamed I was to be feeling it. I knew it wasn’t my parents’ fault. Though by no means affluent, and with a whole tribe of us progeny busy keeping them as far from prosperity as possible, they did their self-sacrificing best. But even if they’d been billionaires they couldn’t have satisfied my hopelessly crass Christmas cravings.

So I felt from quite an early age that the fault was entirely mine. But in retrospect I also partly blame Charles Dickens. If he hadn’t written “A Christmas Carol” after all, and created such an overwhelming illusion of almost unbearable Christmas bliss, perhaps I might have been slightly more moderate in my expectations of it all.

In fact if I’d read a little less voraciously in general, or known not to take Dickens’ or any of my other favourite authors’ inventions quite so much to heart, real life might have been much less disappointing all round.

Celebrating ‘Christmess’

I might also have reacted to the progressive shattering of my illusions a shade less cynically. But I doubt it. When you eventually learn that the author of one of history’s most compelling family-Christmas parables later cast a pall over this and every other season for his wife and twelve children by deserting them in favour of a youthful actress, a certain Scrooge-like cynicism seems entirely appropriate.

As indeed it does to the whole idea of the so-called ‘festive season’. Or, as I’m inclined to think of it, ‘fester season’. Because it makes me as sore as a boil that I’m expected to exchange greetings with not just family and genuine friends, but also with people who, having not bothered to give me the time of day for most of the year, are suddenly all over me with gratuitously saccharine sentiments and a clutter of chirpy cards.

What’s with this sudden gush of goodwill? If it’s too much trouble the rest of the time, why bother faking it for Christmas? Once-a-year good cheer is as tizzy as tinsel, as false as Pressure-Pak Sno, as dispiriting as shopping malls decked-out with mountains of merchandise nobody needs and infested with incessant canned carols.

So why do I go through with “celebrating” such a ‘Christmess’ year after weary year? Same reasons that I suspect that you and many of my other fellow-sufferers do, I guess. Pressure to conform to social convention, partly, but mostly for the sake of the kids.

Hoping that somehow they’ll prove more perceptive than I was at their age, and also more mature, and therefore not take it all too much to heart.Trusting that they won’t find it as big a let-down as I did to discover the folly behind the holly and the naivety behind the nativity.

And that they won’t be as rudely disillusioned as I was to discover that Santa’s just commerce with its claws in their pockets; that Christmas is a good deal more likely to be trite than white, and it’ll be a miracle if all the adults don’t get tight and fight.

Yuletide? Yule be sorry, more like it – first when the hangover hits and again when the credit card bills come due. But hey, here’s wishing you a happy one anyway. Especially if you happen to be one of those enlightened souls who have realised, hopefully at a much earlier age than I did, that Christmas is a season for giving, not getting, and for goodwill to all who genuinely deserve it.

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DEAN JOHNS, after many years in Asia, currently lives with his Malaysian-born wife and daughter in Sydney, where he coaches and mentors writers and authors and practises as a writing therapist. Published books of his columns for Malaysiakini include ‘Mad about Malaysia’, ‘Even Madder about Malaysia’, ‘Missing Malaysia’, ‘1Malaysia.con’ and ‘Malaysia Mania’.