Listen to thisWithout going all the way down the “Bah! Humbug!” road, I must confess to having some trouble with Christmas. There are bits I still love – the whispered excitement of kids wakening up early to open the doors on their advent calendars, signalling the count-down to the “big day”, the letters to Santa, decorating the tree. And I still like the day itself and manage to over-indulge on food and drink without feeling at all guilty about it. The wider commercial indulgence though does fill me with unease and has done for a long while now. Yet it can be hard to break the ridiculous cycle of giving increasingly unnecessary presents to those who neither need nor often even welcome them.
It can take a particular event to introduce some perspective into a situation. I wrote last month of my father-in-law's death. It’s a pretty cataclysmic way of doing so but I suppose death does give life a different slant. Her dad's death prompted my wife to resolve not to give presents this year to nieces and nephews who already want for nothing materially and to give the money instead to an aid organisation to buy a house for a family in Ethiopia.
Once we let people know of our decision, most actually supported it although one brother in law wondered if we might get a house with a swimming pool if he chipped in an extra £50. My daughter was quite taken with one of the other options proposed by the charity – to buy a goat. One of the catch-phrases of animal rights organisations here is “A dog is for life, not just for Christmas.” In many ways a goat really is for life, providing milk and cheese for a whole family to live on or sell off any excess. £30 apparently buys a goat! Such simple messages hit home the real message of Christmas. It’s funny how we manage to so corrupt the story.
Of course we do something similar professionally all the time. Social work or Child and Youth Care work should have an emancipatory potential, bringing about change through human contact and through appropriate challenge to oppressive social structures. Increasingly though, the professions are subsumed beneath ever more regulation and social control. The political meta-narrative of social inclusion only seems to apply to those who fit within a narrowing centre ground. A baby born in a far-off land to an unmarried, dispossessed refugee couple wouldn’t have much of a place within this narrative.
New Year in Scotland is traditionally the time for both looking back and looking forward. My favourite book over the past year was one called From children's services to children's spaces. It essentially reconceptualises children, childhood and our possible responses to them. One memorable phrase from the book talks of “putting a stutter into dominant narratives.” Looking forward to 2003, I hope that we can put a few stutters into the soulless narratives that seem to dominate child and youth here.
Happy Christmas and “A guid New Year”.
Reference
Moss, P. and Petrie, P. (2002) From Children's Services to Children's Spaces London: Routledge/ Falmer
