‘Let’s spare a thought for those who can’t be home for Christmas’

By the last couple of days of the pre-Christmas rush I’ve usually had enough. Enough of tinsel; enough of hohoho’s; but especially enough of piped reindeer-and-snowflake music soaking into my spongy brain as I push an extraordinarily overloaded shopping trolley up and down supermarket aisles.

Now, don’t get me wrong: my objection is not to the sentimentality of the Christmas experience because I, for one, would argue that we don’t have enough sentimentality as it is in a world far too hard-edged for its own good. Rather, it is the packaged sentimentality that I deplore, being little more than a bare-faced peddling of schmalz that seems to blend in rather too well with the hard-edged bean-counting that I alluded to a moment ago.

Let this be said, however: I do like Christmas carols, mainly because there is a quaint Victorian innocence about them – and some, like ‘O Holy Night’ and ‘Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht’ (note the clever switch to German), are masterpieces in the art form of song-writing. No, what I particularly object to is the slop churned out by New York’s Tin Pan Alley (and its successors) whose clash of triumphant cymbals always sounds like the ker-ching of cash registers to me. Except one.

It was 1943 when Bing Crosby crooned that unforgettably moody piece, “I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams”. I suppose the writers of the song, Kim Gannon and Walter Kent, kept a keen eye on the incomings and outgoings, and Bing made enough in his lifetime to suggest he always had a healthy respect for the dollar, but the story of that song meant so much more than a handful of green folding stuff. That year saw the height of fighting intensity in World War II, the year when Germany and Japan were struggling to retain the initiative they had held since attacking the unprepared Allies. And, perhaps, ordinary Americans, from a country that had traditionally turned its back on “entangling alliances”, were less prepared, culturally and psychologically, for the horrors of total war than the historically mercantilist states of Europe and Asia.

Thus, Bing’s song was written from the perspective of a US GI stationed far from home and longing for ‘Mom and Pop ‘n’ apple pie’. Given its historical context, I cannot dismiss it as so much Tin Pan Alley schmalz, as it seems to evoke the terrible sacrifices that ordinary people are sometimes called on to make, contrary to everything in their being, yet who still loyally deliver for the common good of the home they miss.

I was thinking about that song a couple of hours ago after chatting to one of our neighbours, Myra, in which we swapped plans for Christmas Day, just 48 hours off. I didn’t want to be the one to ask the brutal question: “Will Jack be home for Christmas?”, but she had already swallowed hard and told me that no, he would be locked up in a maritime base somewhere in Queensland. Or if he was lucky, he’d be out on the ocean blue, piloting a vessel in one of the hazardous passages through the Great Barrier Reef. It’s not as “romantic” as getting shot at in Italy or the Southwest Pacific, but people like Jack give up their Christmases and all the replenishing love of their families, so that the overwhelming majority of us can carry on with our lives in relative safety and comfort.

Very few of us realise how many people just don’t get the opportunity to have that relaxing sense of home that is at the heart of all Christmas celebrations, including the schmalz. And why? Because, we still expect the world to carry on regardless, to our own satisfaction, and, I fear, are generally indifferent as to how this can happen if everyone got the day off. Well, we know that Jack will guide our bulk cargoes and container goods into safer waters to ensure that there are no hiccups when we stir on December 27 and decide that it’s time we renewed our stocks of food, fun and frivolity, and took stock of our future prosperity. And he’s not the only one.

There are, of course, those secular saints who give up their Christmas entirely to serve lunches to the homeless and other down-and-outers across the country, but they do get some public recognition for their sacrifice. But what about all those people we take for granted, the invisible ones. The bus drivers, the train drivers, the cooks and waiters at those must-go-to Christmas lunches that are de rigueur for the person who demands the best of every experience. The list goes on.

I might even give a plug to myself when I cast my mind back to those days working on a newspaper news desk. While there was never a newspaper for sale on Christmas Day, did anyone wonder how it was possible that the papers appeared without fail in every newsagent and newsstand on Boxing Day? Was it the miraculous work of the omnipotent Media God or did a lot of people give up a great slab of their Christmas Day so that all those sore heads and distended stomachs can still catch up with the latest odds on the Sydney to Hobart yacht race? Or, ponder the Aussies’ chances in the (uniquely brief) ‘traditional’ Boxing Day cricket? Or, whatever is up-to-date news in every special interest in the pastiche that is life in a modern society?

When I was a kid, there was a little ritual observed every Christmas morning, when the garbos did a round of all the streets they had collected bins from during the preceding year. They expected they would get a bottle of something from every household as recognition, I suppose, that it was a rotten, ill-paying job, but that someone had to do it. So, let’s be grateful and a little generous in this season of giving – that appeared to be the general response of our neighbours. Even my father, hostilely anti-union till the day he died, was not immune from that one. And so he religiously put out a bottle of Hock on the front gate-post. (Where he got it from I cannot imagine, as he was always a Tooheys Flag Ale drinker.)

Western societies are so much more complex now than they were in the 1950s, so I’m wondering, could we afford to give everyone we depend on to keep the show on the road a bottle at Christmas? Or is it sufficient that they get their Christmas pleasure (and our Christmas thanks) purely in their dreams? Or maybe I should slip down to the Bottle-O and buy a bottle of Hock for Jack to suck on dreamily when he eventually gets home.