The image that has been transmitted to us for years is that Christmas must be Happy. It is no coincidence that the main Christmas vote in the various languages of the world corresponds to: Merry Christmas!
In this festive season, in movies, music, advertisements and publications on social networks, the mottos of happiness, love, family and union reign. And if we close our eyes, our subconscious immediately takes us near a tall, beautiful Christmas tree covered with golden balls and glittering stars.
Its lights reflect in the eyes of children, smiling and dressed in an elegant way. The house is full of people of all ages, where everyone knows their place, their role and their value. The mother is beautiful, perfectly made up, not tired of the Christmas preparations.
The table is filled with traditional dishes, but served with a gourmet touch. Christmas music rings, bells intensify the emotion, eyes full of love meet. The representative of magic appears – Santa Claus – who brings the presents, perfectly wrapped and even better chosen. Everyone is happy, healthy, well presented and full of conviction that everything is as it should be. But it is just an image, which like all images, does not represent life in all its facets.
If we go back in time, we will arrive at the biblical idea of Christmas and we will actually find some fundamentals that are still current today. One of them is love, but in the broadest form of the word because it translates into love for “the other”.
Who's the other one"? In the anthropological sense, the “other” is a representative of another belief, ethnicity or situation different from ours. In the contemporary world, so much is intended to be done for peace that it has already been discovered that there is no better way than acceptance and integration with the “other”. Active tolerance allows us to grow, develop and cross more and more borders, but there is still a long way to go.
And then, suddenly in the middle of this walk, Christmas arrives. If we look closer, we can observe many “others” with the same idyllic image of Christmas, but to whom life has inserted in circumstances very different from those imagined.
There are those who are cold, there are those who do not know if they will survive until spring, there are those who have lost the will to live, there are those who mourn, there are those who have no one, there are those who have no hope, there are those who have nothing...
To understand the contemporary cultural situation, it is necessary to look at the diversity that coexists and interacts. The original Christmas spirit appears when we stop characterizing individuals as “poor”, “refugees”, “single” or “sick”, looking for other ways of looking at those who are different from us.
That Christmas is a pretext for this and that it means sharing, whether it is physical, material or emotional. May the empathy that makes us so different from other species stimulate the creativity of this magical time, and we can all firmly declare…Merry Christmas!
Author: Anna Kosmider Leal is an anthropologist and linguist, founder of the foreign language teaching platform SpeakingParrot.net.
In 2004, he graduated in Ethnolinguistics, specializing in English/Portuguese languages at the department of Neophilology at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan.
In 2005, he completed a Postgraduate Degree in European Administration at the same University.
In 2014, he completed his PhD in Social Sciences – Specialty in Anthropology – at the Fernando Pessoa University, in Porto, Portugal.
Since 2000, she has worked as a foreign language reader, since 2005 as a university lecturer and translator. Teaching at ISCE since 2015.
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