Ghosts of Christmas Past

I have just put the Christmas tree up, added lights that twinkle, turned off the electronic music that accompanies the flashing lights, added plastic glitter balls and spread a few more festive strings of brightly coloured plastic about the room.   I am now jolly and festive.Usually at this time of the year I head back to the ice, wind and snow of the UK and visit old friends and family. I get a nostalgic buzz from this, but this year I am staying in Hong Kong for the first time in twenty years. The up side is that I will not be reminded how old my friends have become, and thus myself. Though one of my Hong Kong pals has just had a hip replacement, which did my ego no good. It reminded me that I am rapidly approaching the age TV news presenters announce as elderly, when talking about a victim of some traffic atrocity.In my head and my loins I am a young stud, but depressingly when I catch a glimpse in a mirror I am confronted with a grey haired man struggling to keep his waist line down and contemplating how he would look with a face lift. The nostalgia of the season enables one a moment’s melancholy reflection upon the time when one did believe in elves and fairies and magical old men who brought gifts. Though as you can see in the photograph of me fondling a Dennis The Menace Book circa 1959, despite a very cool haircut, I was perhaps not as impressed as adults like to think they were in their childhood.Even as one headed into the grand old cynical age of sixteen, the season held all manner of magical possibilities. The rituals of parties at parent absent homes and maybe getting a kiss from some unknown girl added to the charm and excitement. Some hormonal shenanigans were working to foster this sense of impending destiny, everlasting love, special tasks to be undertaken and a universe to be saved.   For reasons I cannot fathom, the ice, darkness, and blazing coal fires, as they were in those days, were central to the whole chestnut-roasting apocalyptic sense of one’s importance. I assume youngsters nowadays throw cold water on anything pumping carbon into the atmosphere and feel good about that instead.In the golden days of my youth, bells jingled as if they had never jingled before and pantomime dames made up of old TV presenters, cracked obscene jokes about pretty boys played by half-known pop singers. And even though such intellectual entertainment was a rehash of something performed hundred years before, it seemed fresh.Looking backwards, one is saddened by the way the life cycles alters one’s psyche, and one recalls the young and naïve and stupid and useless and foolish and limited selves one once had. The seven ages we glide through might as well be seven different people with photo albums of their previous lives. Am I still that young boy, I wonder, or is he some long dead wood beneath the living sap that I am?We open up the brandy hidden in the cupboard for ten years, pull out the rusty nutcrackers, and search for the one remaining decoration that our grandmothers and grandfathers once pinned on a tree. Something fascinates us about our past but we know it is too disruptive and demotivating to indulge in such thoughts for too long. In a world of infinite cycles where a moment is of insignificance, plans and purposes of the moment never amount to much and will be deemed foolish by our future selves. So we sit and contemplate and explore consciousness over a dead turkey carcass, until the alcohol takes it away.But just for a moment, at this time of year, we of the north and the west allow ourselves to remember those moments huddling in a big bed in a grandparent's cold house with windows rattling in the wind. There is a sock of nuts, oranges and chocolates at its foot, a pile of  toy soldiers, plastic cars, spinning tops, and lego bricks piled beside the fire place. It is a time without mobile phones, without colour TV or even an inside toilet. Here my origins beg the question of how on earth did one go from there to here and how, from here on, things will be even more strange and mystical until all that is left is an image file buried deep and unobserved on what will pass for memory in the future?