Notes on Christmas

It’s Christmas Eve, and I’m happy I managed to watch my Big Three Christmas films this week: Eyes Wide Shut, Bridget Jones’s Diary, and, obviously, It’s a Wonderful Life. Whenever I’m feeling down to the point of exhaustion, I think of George Bailey, how he suffers almost as much as Jesus Christ, and still manages to find a spark in life through his family and friends. This year, Dora (one of my gifts of 2025) distilled the message into a single line, “Never kill yourself!!”, repeated about twenty times a day. I am not lying – this film has changed my life. Frank Capra never ceases to amaze me; It Happened One Night also offers a kind of naïvety that feels almost extinct in the twenty-first century. Still, I finally gave Joni Mitchell’s Blue a try, and now I can’t get out of bed. All I can think about is that I’m a terrible writer and that I didn’t get to wear my blue dress last week. I’m jealous of Capra for his ability to channel an optimistic view of the past, to reminisce without resentment. There are angels and demons everywhere right now.

When explaining the origin of her song The Last Time I Saw Richard (the closing track on Blue), Mitchell said that fellow folk singer Patrick Sky told her she was “a hopeless romantic. There’s only one way for you to go: hopeless cynicism”. That kind of self-protection gets stripped away at Christmas. Everyone looks so vulnerable. Mitchell gives it all away for Santa, too. River, for example, is the ultimate Christmas song: a break-up song staged within a cold, glittering landscape. Her loneliness and regret speak louder than the choirs, and the mourning isn’t only for someone she lost, but for someone she thought she could become with him. River is life (as João Guimarães Rosa reminds us), and its flow turns skating into a fantasy of easy escape: a clean, gliding exit from guilt, from consequences, from the parts of the self that keep undoing love even while craving it. It’s cold, isolating, yet beautiful and tender. I’m not sure she wrote it straight from pain; rather, the song feels like the moment she realises (too late) that you can’t outrun what you carry.

I wish I had a river so long

I would teach my feet to fly

Oh, I wish I had a river I could skate away on

I made my baby say goodbye

It’s coming on Christmas

They’re cutting down trees

They’re putting up reindeer

And singing songs of joy and peace

I wish I had a river I could skate away on

Being able to enjoy feeling alive and loved, despite crippling circumstances, is what I feel during festive times. Heartbreak songs are best written once the ache has passed and you can tell what was real and what wasn’t… but not to “portray reality” as such; rather, to sharpen the imagination, with insights that might have helped you handle everything better. Still, you didn’t. Maybe that’s okay. Empathy towards yourself makes for better art, and it annoys people less. Optimism is built through time. Now, I’m trapped in that contradiction, among many others my heart carries. The ambivalence of Christmas, though, should lean towards kindness – to others, but especially to yourself.