I bumped into a classmate of mine the other day. It was
christmas day in the morning. She was in a hurry, just like everybody else,
rushing to do the last shoppings before the ‘big’ day. She was after the sweet
rolled dough filled with nuts, a must have, especially if you buy it from
Annie’s Home Made. She said hello, smiled politely, asked about my health bla
bla bla. To my surprise I answered the
same way although all I wanted to do was to smash that pretty dimpled face of
hers against the wall. I’m hundred percent positive that the feeling was
mutual. We had lived once to make each others life miserable. Still, it was
christmas. We had to show kindness, right? This is what it’s all about: being
nice to people who you haven’t been in touch with for a long time, being nice
to people who come unscrupulously to knock on your door and sing a carol, being
nice to people who at the end of the year suddenly remember that you still
breathe, being nice to people who show up once in a while asking for favors and
now they’re just paying their respect, being nice to people you’d rather see
two meters under the ground…All these colorful species just keep coming and
going through your home and you find yourself smiling and welcoming, setting
specific dishes on the table, and everybody is nibbling on the food, which you
ordered so carefully from a catering service. Why the hell should you bother to
cook if you anyway throw away most of it? But it’s part of the picture: the
rissoles, schnitzels, roulades and boeuf salads, the sweet rolled dough, the plastic christmas tree with the star on
the top full of jelly filled chocolate candies wrapped nicely in shiny colored
tinfoil, the blinking lights on the tree, on your roof, on your entrance door,
on your back door, everywhere, the large red socks hanging from your fireplace
where the fire’s still smouldering…When you come to think of it you created
this pixel perfect picture just to show these people that you’re not any
different from them, that you’re doing the same thing on the same occasion as
they are, and maybe you try to attach some meaning to it, you spoil yourself
with the thought that you’re celebrating
something called life, where in fact what you do is just the yearly routine,
nothing special, nothing meaningful.
to think is free