Joyce Fegan: Is Christmas an essential celebration?

With so much uncertainty surrounding the festive season this year, here are some ways to save Christmas: donate to charity, shop local, support Irish retailers, oh, and please, please boycott Amazon

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has already done very well out of the pandemic, increasing his wealth by over €62bn. Picture: Mario Tama/Getty Images

It's the middle of November and Christmas is, at the same time, the main thing on our minds and totally up in the air.

This week, there's been talk of postponing Christmas to the end of January. The now-near ritualised return home of our immigrants has been advised against, as non-essential travel. 

And it's understood our Government is planning to keep a ban on house visits and travelling outside our 5km radius after December 1.

Neighbourhood chat has already veered into the what-are-your-plans-for-Christmas chat. The emphasis on the 'your'.

 As if the recipient of the question might have some great hack or prised piece of certainty to impart to the holder of the question. Certainty is in low supply. Uncertainty is not.

We have become as accustomed to uncertainty as we have to restriction. With little else happening in our lives, many of our minds have wandered to Christmas. 

"Where will we put the tree?" argue the couple in their new home. "What do you buy a baby for their first Christmas?" the novice parents ask of their experienced friends.

You get the answers only to find out that even the Christmas aisles in Woodies are cordoned off. Not an essential item. Children's toys, wooden ones, are they considered an essential item? Who knows.

Our talk used to be about essential services, now it's about essential items, and what classifies them.

With Covid-19, our other humanly rituals of celebration around marriage, death and birth have all been greatly impacted. As it now stands, only 25 people can attend a wedding or a funeral.

But Christmas – is that considered an essential celebration?

If we do not have infections of Covid-19 under control by December, tradition on this land, going back thousands of years, could well be impacted too.

Long before Christmas became a Christian celebration, there was the Celtic celebration at the end of December, a festival for the darkest time of the year, the winter solstice. 

The Celts burnt the Yule log to counter the darkness of mid-winter.

Humans do not do well with little daylight and little connection and so Christmas, a time to connect, to look forward to, to give, to receive, to celebrate, became a treasured mid-winter festival.

After eight months of restricted living, cocooning, social distancing, babies' heads going un-wetted and the isolating of older people in nursing homes, Christmas has never been more essential.

Tomás Ryan, associate professor at Trinity College’s school of biochemistry and immunology, hit headlines this week when he was on Newstalk with Ciara Kelly.

He was cautious about lifting restrictions on December 1, saying it was “in everybody’s interests” to extend the restrictions by a few more weeks.

But what's a few more weeks?

“One way of looking at this would be to delay Christmas until the end of January and have a real Christmas and a real party then,” he said.

And then the neighbourly what-are-your-plans-for-Christmas chat veered dramatically into "Did you hear they want to cancel Christmas?"

But Tomás Ryan does not have a seat at the Cabinet table. However, many of us would love to now have a seat at the Cabinet table to know what's going to happen to Christmas.

It is very likely that the unfolding situation of Covid-19 infection rates will be continually monitored on a day-to-day basis by experts as it has all year. 

These experts, and the situation in our ICUs, will be relayed to our Government. 

The Cabinet will consider the information at hand, maybe in the first week or so in December, and a decision will be made.

But, in the meantime, what's a lay person to do? How can we take back some semblance of certainty for Christmas in a year marred by uncertainty?

There are lots of ways to save Christmas. Here are just some:

Imagine waking up on Christmas morning with this picture in your mind's eye: a child, you'll never meet, surrounded with presents they dared to hope for, but feared they'd never get.

There are still people in need. Problems with poverty in our affluent society still persist. 

There are parents who are currently weighing up the price of electricity bills against the cost of a present or a table full of food. Then throw Covid into the mix, there are people who will be in need for the first time this year.

"I think need will be more so than previous years with people who never needed help coming into the net [St Vincent de Paul's services] after months of the Covid payment and intermittent work," says a St Vincent de Paul (SVP) volunteer.

"You can make ends meet but throw Christmas into the mix when you are only just getting by and life becomes very hard," she adds.

So in a year when more people than ever are in need, and our usual bucket collections and food drives and giving trees are not a runner – how do we help?

Toys can still be purchased, but virtually. For anyone able and wishing to help, all giving options are at www.svp.ie

And you might not just be helping a child's Christmas come true, you could be helping a parent avoid aggressive money lenders, and dreading massive bills come January.

That's one way to certainly save Christmas, that Covid can't touch.

Another way to save Christmas is by embracing the tidal shift against our culture of consumption.

Black Friday is around the corner, otherwise known as Amazon's, or its founder Jeff Bezos' biggest annual payday. 

And he's already done very well out of this pandemic – Covid-19 helped to increase his wealth by $74bn (over €62bn) so far this year, according to the Bloomberg billionaires index.

He's the first person in the world to accumulate a fortune of more than $200bn. With the mark of a pen he could end all hunger and disease and still be left with half his wealth. But we're still waiting.

So what can we do?

We can shop local. We can buy from Irish creators and makers. We can help our neighbours pay their mortgages and feed their kids, instead of adding to the already-overflowing pockets of a man who can't even take care of his own staff. 

This stone kills two birds, because buying locally means lowering our carbon footprint too.

And books – let's please, please, please boycott Amazon. How? Again, buy from an Irish retailer or else check out this "revolutionary", as the Guardian calls it, new shop – bookshop.org.

This new online bookshop unites independent bookshops to rival Amazon, and already more than 130 shops have partnered up.

Christmas is different this year. 

It's up in the air. And it's surrounded by uncertainty, but there are certain things we can do, like helping another human being by giving, or by buying locally, that can happen regardless of what Covid does or what Cabinet says.