A CBeebies Christmas

Christmas again. Bang bang bang.

The wee guys like CBeebies. They also like other channels, but I like CBeebies because it doesn't have adverts or particular shoutiness.

This week they seem to have kicked off their Christmas stuff. It's lovely. I have issue with the Christmas/children thing because, erm, I don't believe in all the son of God stuff and that's a rather large part of it. I guess they have to know it sometime, but I'm not comfortable with telling them. I'm hoping that can be left up to Someone Else, like a teacher. The daughter of a friend of mine came home appalled because they had been taught songs at nursery with swearing in them. After some persuasion she revealed that the swearing in question was "Jesus Christ". Is an issue.

Anyway. This is what Christmas means to me (expanding on comments from before and quite probably boring into a stupor):

A celebration of winter.
I think that this is possibly the reason for the date, because Jesus Christ, if he existed, definitely wasn't born in December. It's a midwinter thing, possibly even a pagan date. So none of that makes sense, but it is nice to celebrate winter. All the glittery snowscenes, and lights to make the most of the dark really do herald being in deepest winter. Roaring fires, gluhwein, roasted chestnuts, perpetual hope for cotton wool snow on Christmas morning; that's all nothing to do with Christmas and everything to do with December.

Family, friends and fuckwits.
Christmas time means you get in touch with everyone. You catch up. You find out what people have been up to. You arrange meet ups and people make the effort to join in. You stop and think about the people in your life, what they like, what they do, what they want. It's nice, even if it's fleeting, grudged and seemingly unreciprocated. You wish everyone good cheer and spread a little reluctant happiness. If you don't do anything, you still find out who is thinking about you, and you get grand TV and time off work. And really, noone's particularly worse than they are the rest of the year, and given that it matters so damned much to most people, you can drink silly amounts of alcohol for the sake of it.

It's not magical, it is expensive and it well and truly hits home all the gaps you have in terms of socialising and family, but this time, the build up, the pre-Christmas sparkle, well, it's nice.

CBeebies gets this. It's all glitter and songs and snowflakes and cookies. No Jesus, no family, just a happy atmosphere where everyone loves* Christmas and each other.

So, a very CBeebies Christmas to everyone.




*they actually do, these people are the nicest on the planet.