Rosemary McLeod: Serenity of childhood Christmas seems far away

Photo / Thinkstock

It would be nice to return to the blissful boredom of a childhood Christmas.

What bliss to have no responsibility, nothing to do, and somehow feel that it's all about you, all toys and sweets, new books to read, and lots of good food. Chocolates appeared from nowhere in pretty little glass bowls, never seen for the rest of the year.

Fruit jubes were stuck on to the branches of special little plastic trees, also put away for next Christmas, and my family tried not to fight. They sometimes succeeded.

Surely Christmas Day then was always hot, and you lay like cats on your creaky single beds when you weren't eating. Outside long grass forced through the prized plants in the garden, as they're doing now in my garden, and surely the heat made people too slack to care.

There was a presence then of that current embarrassment, the Christian thing, which however badly people in my family might behave, was generally agreed to be the reason for the day, and a good reason not to revive old grievances - in theory if not in fact. My family clung to the shell of the Christian thing as tightly as it clung to grudges, and they sometimes overlapped.

I now own the boy doll that arrived, with a girl doll, for my mother and her sister at Christmas long ago. Who got which doll was a bitter annual re-enactment as long as the sisters lived, yet they still got soppy when Christmas carols sang out from the radio. In reality my childhood Christmases always had an underlying, subtle sense of menace, as if a fragile glass was about to topple and break.

No-one gets out of childhood without the scars to show for it.

At this time of year we're usually warned about family violence and badgered about overspending, as if Christmas is an unfortunate hangover from some pagan rite, and basically a primary cause of ill feeling between people.

In Wellington we have public decorations again, after last year's Calvinist fit in the city council, when we had none, perhaps on the assumption that such a religious festival ought to be tidily banned. In Britain, we gather, the very word can be abhorrent, like Easter, for fear of offending people who believe in different things.

How slight such ideas seem against the backdrop of the last two week's tragedies, which ought rightly to make people feel small if they don't just give thanks for being alive. Your family may drive you mad, but you still know its address.

I can't remember a Christmas quite like this one for its overhang of tragedy, dwarfing smaller battles close at hand.

The siege of Martin Place brought the unwelcome knowledge that the world is on our doorstep, not so hopelessly far away that we're always safe. The massacre of children and teachers in Pakistan, which followed on my birthday, was unspeakable. And then, in what I hope will be the final dark event of the festive season, eight children were murdered in a house in North Queensland. The mother of seven, and aunt of the eighth, has been charged with the crimes.

I can remember when the news wasn't yet real, just boring static interrupting the noisy business of being a child. But when you're no longer a child the news no longer happens in a made-up world of no personal relevance, and you feel a connection to other human beings, to strangers, whatever they believe in, and the fragility of all our lives. We live, ultimately, at each other's mercy, as these events showed.

The Christian thing is fading here, and will fade more as immigrants arrive with many different beliefs and customs.

I hope that what will survive will be an appreciation of all kindness, of selflessness in difficult times, without which all people sink into barbarism.

The idea that anyone was born to save the world from itself looks, today, like an extremely nice idea, but a very slender hope.