The spirit of Christmas

Not being able to help everyone doesn’t mean you shouldn’t help anyone

Where did it all come from, this Christmas spirit?

Merry Christmas, one and all.

So, has Santa been good to you? Were you a good girl? Or boy? You do know that good children get Christmas socks, and when they’re naughty they get told to pull them up? The tradition of giving at Christmas is unquenchable. But where did it all stem from? This spirit of Christmas?

The spirit of Christmas, which is celebrated in the Dickens short story A Christmas Carol, is said to date back to the first Epiphany, the twelfth of the twelve days of Christmas, when, by Shakespearean tradition, a play was performed about a shipwreck and mistaken identity and, by biblical tradition, the Three Wise Men rolled up a week and a half late after plodding their way for a full month on camelback across savage territory from Yerevan in Armenia, supposedly following a star with trackability akin to that of a tethered drone. Having been misdirected to Jerusalem, where they were received by another king, Herod Antipas, the kings of the orient realised their trigonometry was wrong and landed, finally, at the birthplace of Jesus, a mere five and a half miles to the south. Yes, I also have my doubts about this “star” story.

What the men brought with them is discussed by me in a previous article, which I commend to you:

With that, you might think I’d exhausted all I have to say about the Three Wise Men, but I’m afraid you’d be wrong. Here I went again:

This Christmas, I’d like to add some thoughts to what I’ve already written about Christmas, and what I have to say is inspired by a rail trip I took last Saturday—from little acorns do mighty oaks grow.

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To deserve what you get, you need to need; to deserve what you give, you need the spirit of Christmas

My car was in the repair shop, and I was off to Charleroi to pick it up. The mechanic would be at the station to give me a lift to his workshop—a simple act of kindness on his part. When I came back from Charleroi after having dropped the car there three weeks previously, I related my adventure to you here:

The weekday fare I paid that day for the rail ticket back home was 13 euros 50. But, upon returning to Charleroi on Saturday, I discovered to my pleasant surprise that the weekend ticket cost only 9 euros 50. Four euros cheaper. Nice.

On the Brussels-Charleroi leg of the trip, I settled myself into the comfort of the upper level of a double-decker carriage and dreamed out of the window at the passing townscape and countryside. Presently, the sliding door behind me opened, and a tramp appeared, bearing printed yellow cards, whose text I knew. Off by heart. Je n’ai pas d’argent, ni d’abri. Je vous demande poliment quelques pièces pour pouvoir manger. S’il vous plaît.

It so happens that, the previous day, I had learned from my accountant that I owe him 7,700 euros. Arrears of fees, dating back as far as 2017. He’d not impressed upon me the level of my debt to him in all that time, so it came as a shock. It’s something I have discussed with a friend, who has most munificently said he has the means to help me out if I need it. I have thanked him and said I will hold back until I have the reaction to a payment of 4,600 euros that I transferred to the accountant on Friday. That in the end has sweetened him enough to actually do my annual accounts, which need submitting before the end of January. That’s the accountant’s leverage, because unenforced debts from 2017 are in fact forfeit after five years.

With this financial burden weighing on my mind, I waved the tramp away, and he continued his solicitations down the length of the carriage. A minute later, I sensed him retracing his steps to exit the vestibule compartment and take the stair back down to the lower level, and I stopped him. I reached into my pocket and gave him two euros.

Two measly, pathetic euros.

Two euros will never make the difference between what I have, which is nothing, and what I owe, which is far more than two euros. But two euros to this man could mean the difference between eating and not eating, and I want him to eat. He doffed his cap and said a sincere thank you in French. I said, “Ce n’est rien,” and that’s true. It was half what I had saved on my rail fare from travelling at the weekend instead of during the week. Half for him, half for me. And I gave the other half to a woman begging at the traffic lights on Rue Belliard yesterday. Because she too asked me.

I’m not entirely sure how people can view their “economies”, their “savings”, such as the cut-price rail ticket here, as an asset, to be jealously guarded and kept for themselves, as if it were taxed income. When we were children, we would say finders, keepers; losers, weepers. He who found something kept it; he who didn’t would weep. Others gaining what was never really rightfully theirs by simply finding it doesn’t make me feel sorry for myself. I feel sorry for them; for their inability to share their bounty.

I once asked a member of my own family who is very well off to contribute to an appeal I organised for a friend in The Gambia, and he declined, saying, “You can’t help everyone.” Of course, he’s right, you can’t help everyone. But you can often help those who ask. Not everyone asks, but not everyone who asks, asks you. If you pay a little bit of attention to everyone who asks, and if you remain aware of those who don’t ask but who need help, I’m sure you too could spare two euros for each of them, and you’d never notice it. And if enough people gave two euros, why, there would be so many grateful mercis, it might just sound like some heavenly choir of angels. But, why the heck should you? What did they do to deserve it? Well … what did you do to deserve it?

Noam Chomsky once said: “The more privilege you have, the more opportunity you have. The more opportunity you have, the more responsibility you have.” You can’t be given the opportunity to earn by dint of your privilege and then keep it all just for yourself. That’s not privilege, it’s tyranny.

What the poor do to deserve your generosity is to need it.

And what you do to deserve what you have to give is realise what the spirit of Christmas is. If you don’t, you abuse your privilege and abrogate your responsibility, and so you don’t deserve it.

Three anecdotes.

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1. Vindictive Vancouver

In the mid-1990s, a friend and I visited Vancouver in the Canadian province of British Columbia. We stayed at a gay guest house and, despite the late hour of our arrival, they gave us a briefing on the best places to go for sightseeing and socialising. They also included a stern warning not to give money to the putative plague of beggars who peopled the downtown area. The local chamber of commerce had become so irritated with people being solicited for donations at every other street corner, they conducted an experiment. One of their members disguised himself as a down-and-out and stationed himself at a well-frequented street corner. He reportedly garnered an untaxed income of around 80 Canadian dollars a day. This was reported as valid grounds to drive the tramps out of Vancouver: they earned too much, tax free. Would the tramps have been left alone if they’d only earned ten dollars a day, tax free, I wonder?

Why the chamber of commerce was concerned was, I suppose, the same reason why London’s shops urged police to move costermongers out of the city (the Pearly Kings and Queens, as we know them today). Because they allegedly littered the street and put people off coming into their shops.

In any event, this guest house, as a member of the chamber, asked us kindly not to give. And the fact that they did so means they thought we looked as if we might want to give to beggars. In other words, their intention was to staunch our charitable spirit, and I’m pretty sure they reeled off the same spiel to all their guests.

What, exactly, a tax-free income of 80 Canadian dollars a day is testament to isn’t clear to me. It could indicate the effectiveness of the begging skills of Vancouver’s tramps (or the money-raising acumen of the decoy assigned by the chamber to uncover just how much illicit gain the deprived were depriving them of). Or it might be a testament to the compassion, public-spiritedness and generosity, not to mention fat pocketbooks, of Vancouver inhabitants. What it likely does not demonstrate is the astute abilities of Vancouver tramps to prize money out of passers-by, unless said passers-by are especially weak-willed; which is also possible. Come to mention it, that is more a propensity demonstrated by the members of Vancouver’s chamber of commerce, surely? What the experiment clearly does show is the downright envy and mean-spiritedness of Vancouver’s retail sector.

I wonder whether the guest house would have positively encouraged us to give these down-and-outs money if they’d then used their 80 dollars a day to rent rooms at their hostelry. To wash in warm water and soap. To regain a sense of dignity and gradually emerge from the gutter into which they had fallen and from which they emitted their pleas for succour, sort of akin to some commercial enterprise beckoning members of the public to enter its portals and buy the wares without which they simply could not exist.

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2. Beer cans for a Winnebago

There used to be a German television show Wetten, dass …, which translates roughly as “I bet you…”, in which host Thomas Gottschalk would introduce challenges by people who thought they could do things that others can’t, like identify zoo animals from the smell of their excrement, or put their trousers on without holding the waistband. All good family fun. One guy who came on the show won his bet: he purchased a Winnebago mobile home despite being homeless and, what’s more, because he was homeless. And he financed it with beer cans.

Beer cans in Germany carry a deposit: return them and you get about 10 or 20 cents, like lemonade bottles used to be in some places. But, around the football ground of Sankt Pauli, in this man’s native city of Hamburg, football supporters are more interested in seeing the match than trotting back to the drinks supplier to get their 20 cents. So the man would collect these discarded cans and turn them to silver himself. And he did it so much as to be able to buy a Winnebago. I don’t think anyone begrudged him his achievement; after all, it cost him nothing, except the hard work of collecting the cans and returning them to the shops, and the owners of the cans had in fact waived their refund of 20 cents by chucking them away.

The moral of the story is clear. In England they say look after the pennies, and the pounds look after themselves and in Scotland we say many a mickle mak’s a muckle. In Germany it must be many a beer can can bag you a Winnebago. In Belgium, just one two-euro coin can make a tramp’s dinner. Twenty cents, two euros, a mickle or a penny. It’s astonishing how little you need in order to make a big difference.

When businesspeople make too much money, their customers start to feel hard done by: we start to hate the oligarchs. But when tramps start to earn too much money, do we start to hate them as well? Are we really so dog-in-the-manger?

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3. Hat check fraud

A few years back, I volunteered to man a hat check for an amateur performance in a large Brussels theatre. I knew the organiser. I asked people who deposited their hats and coats for a tip of 50 cents per item. Many contributed gladly. Some asked if I took Payconiq, which is a mobile payment app. I told them it’s a tip, not an invoice settlement, but unfortunately, they didn’t carry small change. (Side point: mobile apps shield you convincingly from flag-day tin-rattlers.)

When my—erstwhile—organiser friend learned of my requests to ‘her’ audience, she was livid and demanded that I hand over the money forthwith, which I did: volunteers don’t get tips. They don’t get paid, they don’t get reimbursed their expenses, and they most certainly do not get tips: she gets them. She said I was a thief and dishonest, whereas I’d simply asked for the tip, like the tramp on the train had asked for a few pennies. Okay, I admit, not quite like the tramp on the train: I returned their coats to them if they didn’t have the money. One has to use what leverage one has, even to extract 50 piddling little cents.

Leverage is something that this lady knew about. I was acquainted with her because she’d made costumes for a theatre company whose committee I sat on. But she was certainly no volunteer: she charged for her services and for the material she used, and then, after the show, she made an offer to sell the costumes to the actors. I would have thought that, after the theatre company had paid for the labour and material, the costumes belonged to it, but she took another view, and then argued it was agreed, which someone maybe had, although it wasn’t at a committee meeting that I’d attended. She has an interesting take on what constitutes honesty, what constitutes begging, and what constitutes thievery, not to mention the inherent characteristics of volunteering. A bit like the chamber of commerce in Vancouver, B.C.

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What did Jesus do to deserve His Christmas presents?

Jesus can hardly have been described as a good boy: He’d hardly had any chance to be a naughty boy by the time He received His first Christmas presents. So, like all children, He received them anyway, just for being a child. But He wasn’t the Three Wise Men’s child. So, what’s with the gifts?

There is a big element of the Three Wise Men that seems to get overlooked by everyone at Christmas: they were kings. If not actual kings of kingdoms, they were very important people who had a buck or two. Otherwise, Herod would not have given them his ear. They brought with them gifts, opulent gifts that people like Mary and Joseph could never have afforded themselves. So, in case you really never have tumbled to this, Christmas presents are a con, foisted upon us by pure commercial interests, corporations who never give anything, at least not without getting value in return. How do I know this? Well, I’m not a king. Are you?

Children aside for the second, a lot of Christmas giving these days is predicated on some notion that you owe the recipient. Either because they have been good to you (you want to say thank you), or because you know they will buy something for you, and you want to anticipate that by at least having an “and this is for you” in return. What we call gifts are in fact consideration in a legal sense: a quid pro quo, oil on the cogs of our social or business machinery and, what’s more, often a sine qua non. Christmas presents may well be given, but they also have to be received, and that makes them transactional. What they’re called—gifts—is not what they are.

So, tell me, what had Jesus done for which the Magi needed to say “Thank you”? Or was it the fondue set that Mary and Joseph had had Camelback Express Deliveries ship to them that they wanted to acknowledge? There’s nothing wrong with expressions of gratitude for kindnesses offered. It’s just that this has nothing to do with Christmas; commerce has sold us this story in order to flog us their tat.

There is no reciprocity in the original Christmas gifts: you might say that neither Jesus nor his parents had done anything to deserve them. I can’t myself tell you what the Magi’s reasoning was, but I wonder if I would be that far off if I said that these three gentlemen of the East recognised the Earth-shattering importance of what they’d seen in the firmament, and their gifts not only marked the significance of the child’s arrival on Earth, but were designed to ensure He would survive hale and hearty to fulfil His destiny by surmounting the perils of infant mortality. Therefore, the provision of vital sustenance to the poor is, and has since its inception always been, a large component of the Christmas spirit.

The spirit of Christmas as encapsulated in Charles Dickens’s short story has got absolutely nothing to do with the spirit of Christmas that is brandished as desirable before our gullible eyes and that involves trudging the length and breadth of shopping centres and online stores for the perfect gift for a dear friend or relative who doesn’t even need it (like willy-warmers for the man who has … everything). Even the commercial duress that is practised upon parents by motivating children to send letters up the chimney mirrors the positioning of sweets near to supermarket checkouts, so that, as they wait to pay, mothers will be pestered by bored kids attracted by the colourful wrappers and enticing odours of the sweetmeats arrayed at their eye level. Shops stock what sells, and sell what is bought, so they entice those who have wherewithal and who don’t need to buy, to maximise their purchases by whatever manipulations they can dream up, including their version of child labour. Dickens’s spirit of Christmas, on the other hand, involves giving something radically different: acts of kindness and human understanding. To people who do need it.

I don’t know if the Magi got value in return for their gifts; maybe it’s the value we got in return for their gifts that makes them worthwhile. But charitable giving is an astonishingly rare thing at Christmas. Oh, we buy charity cards and we pop a penny in the old man’s hat, but we don’t spend half as much on caring for those who have nothing as we lavish on our friends, relations and selves, as if we were kings. We have national holidays and religious holidays and social holidays, but where is the day in the calendar on which the entire world donates a day’s wages to charity? In my view there should be one, and 25 December would be ideal.

What was good about the Good Samaritan?

It is, to my mind and ironically, not the Nativity story that typifies the spirit of Christmas. It is instead the parable of the Good Samaritan. The Gospel of Saint Luke, chapter 10:

²⁵ And, behold, a certain lawyer stood up, and tempted him, saying, Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? ²⁶ He said unto him, What is written in the law? how readest thou? ²⁷ And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself. ²⁸ And he said unto him, Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live.

²⁹ But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour? ³⁰ And Jesus answering said, A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead. ³¹ And by chance there came down a certain priest that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. ³² And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side. ³³ But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him, ³⁴ and went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. ³⁵ And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee. ³⁶ Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves? ³⁷ And he said, He that shewed mercy on him. Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise.

It is important that the Good Samaritan was good, but not particularly that he was a Samaritan (although the ‘outsider’ element does have some bearing, as I say below). He happened to come from Samaria in the story. Samaria is nowadays in the Occupied West Bank, between ancient Judaea and Galilee. But that is unimportant, as is the fact that Samaritans and Jews in the days of Jesus didn’t especially like each other. None of that is important, nor is it important that those who passed by on the other side were a priest and a Levite (a Jew of the tribe of Levi). The single factor that distinguishes the Samaritan is that, of the three guys who happened by, he, and he alone, felt compassion. Not a legal duty, and not a duty that played upon his sense of morals. Compassion is not, you may be surprised to hear me say, a question of morals. There is no moral tussle on the right thing to do. Compassion is a sense of love of one’s fellow man that springs from the heart involuntarily; it brooks no internal struggle with your own rights to defend yourself, your own rightness in protecting your own interests, or your own justifications, however crooked and devised they might be. Compassion springs and does, period. It’s like blinking or breathing.

The nature of compassion

In the 1993 film Schindler’s List, there is a scene in which Oskar Schindler and Amon Goeth discuss what is power. “Power is when we have every justification to kill, and we don’t,” Schindler tells Goeth.

A little later in the film, we see Goeth trying to put this into practice: not punishing people, but instead holding his hand in an act of mercy, like the gesture with which Jesus is often depicted. But Goeth’s endeavours to forgive, to exercise the power of which Schindler speaks, are in vain: because he can’t feel compassion. To him, power is manifested in its expression, not in restraint, let alone in some innate welling of compassion within him. He can only think about pursuing the demonic desires that drive him like some second nature. Compassion is something whose acquaintance he had never made and never would.

The word has its etymological roots in com-, or with, and passion, which means suffering, from Latin pati, to suffer. Passion was initially, and still is, used to describe the suffering of Christ upon His cross (it is related to our modern word patient, meaning someone who suffers from illness; those who are passionate nowadays suffer from their yearning for something). You can see these linguistic roots clearly when the word gets translated: Mitleid in German (mit = with; Leid = suffering), or medelijden in Dutch (mee + lijden).

Compassion, therefore, is to suffer with someone. And suffering is involuntary. No one chooses to suffer, except the most desperate. A little like the difference between sympathy and empathy: the former is where you can imagine how another person feels; the latter is where you know, because you’ve felt it yourself. It’s because of its involuntary nature that compassion isn’t the result of conscious decisions. It is subconscious; it wells up within an individual, just like the instinct to breathe or blink. But, like breathing and blinking, it is also an act you can be made consciously aware of: you can do it deliberately, like when your doctor asks you to take a deep breath.

I cannot prove it, but it is, I believe, possible that babies experience true compassion. They laugh when they are laughed at, they stop crying when they feel comforted, and they start again when people shout at them. I believe that babies show true, unadulterated compassion—it is something with which we are all born, our natural state. And, as some of us grow up, we learn, we pro-actively learn, to turn away from it. We get “toughened up”. We are not naturally indifferent: we learn to be indifferent, we learn that business is business, that real men don’t cry, we learn semper fi, yes SIR! We think it’s maturity, and duty to the flag and being all grown up, but it’s just social conditioning, like spending a fortune we don’t have on Christmas presents is social conditioning. However, just as CPU, or the kiss of life, can bring you back from the brink of death to breathe again, so you can also be rescued from a state of insouciance in order to, again, feel compassion.

But not when we surround ourselves with the comforts and paddings and safety nets that shield, protect and insulate us from the suffering of others. If you give a man the means to do otherwise, you will have great difficulty in teaching him compassion. That’s where it differs from breathing and blinking. Just like you can teach him to save his documents regularly on his computer. Once the habit is learned, it will become semi-automatic. But there will be times he forgets, and loses his data. On the other hand, if the compassion that rises naturally within him has not been unlearned, no distraction will ever cause him to err from the path it lays out before him. For those who question themselves as to who, then, is their neighbour, for whom compassion does indeed become a moral dilemma, they are encouraged by Jesus’ parable to follow the naturally compassionate. Like this tricky lawyer following the Samaritan.

Like him who had compassion, like him who showed mercy, like him who disinfected (with wine—alcohol) and soothed (with oil) the victim’s wounds, like him who gave two pence for the man’s care (unlike the two who couldn’t give tuppence), like him who was a Samaritan and an outsider, like him should we go and do likewise. Not bestowing abundance upon our own kith and kin in expectation of thanks, reward, acknowledgement and recognition, but rendering care anonymously, precisely unto those whom we do not even know. That is the spirit of Christmas. Thank God it’s Christmas / Let it be Christmas every day, sings Freddie Mercury. Read this paragraph again, and let your hearts agree with him entirely.

Next year, when you budget your Christmas spending, and if you are able, then give at least something, no matter how little, to the innocent:

• to children, who revel and learn how to socialise in play and make-believe, for their reality will change soon enough;

• and to those children whose reality has already changed, and who struggle, and suffer, and hunger, and are orphaned, and are trafficked, and are abused, and are enslaved, and are taken advantage of;

• and to the unfortunates of our society, for they are still our society and they are very much the products of our society, and a society that cannot, or obstinately will not, care for its poor is not worthy to be called a society. It is our willingness to treat them as part of our society that even makes us a society, and not a club.

We do our young-ones more favours by teaching them to give of themselves at Christmas, to do a good turn to someone who is less fortunate than they are, regardless of how fortunate or unfortunate they in fact are, than by bestowing on them gifts that parents cannot afford or, even worse, opulence that they can. The perfect gift for Christmas is not socks or a doll or a train set. It is love.

Oh, and remember: the first Christmas gifts were given by kings: theirs is a tradition that we are encouraged to copy, after our own means, but not to emulate, after theirs.

Have a happy, and thoughtful, Christmas.

The Good Samaritan, painted by the Antwerp artist Jacob Jordaens, circa 1616. By Jacob Jordaens - si.wsj.net, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19655930.

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