Celebrating our celebrations

If you celebrate Christmas, when did you put up your decorations this year?

In our house, we don’t normally put our decorations up for very long: about a week or so each side of Christmas. But this is not a normal year: we put our decorations up a week early, and I think that many other people did the same. This year (if you live in the Northern Hemisphere) it felt like we needed those extra lights in the darkest time of the year. Even though the timing might have been a break with tradition, it felt important that we could still keep some traditions in some form, despite the challenges we face together.

The value of decoration was brought home to me even more this year by the extra effort made by the shops in the town where I live. For the past few years, many of these shops have had their windows painted by a handful of local companies, but this year even more seemed to join in. The picture at the top of this article shows just some of these paintings.

Those shops have had a particularly hard year, as they have had to close and open for unknown periods as we have struggled to adapt to the pandemic, and deal with its own adaptations. That makes it particularly poignant to see the decoration of the shops - intended partly to brighten up the town, partly to celebrate the season, but also to attract customers who, once again, are not allowed to visit.

I think that the ways in which people have decorated their homes and shops have, as with so many things this year, shown our ordinary experience in a new light. In a year where we face a fatal threat, we deliberately choose to do something which is not essential to our physical survival, but which, for a time, makes the world a friendlier, warmer and more beautiful place. It reminds me of the celebrations in the UK this year of the 75th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe, when the streets were filled with bunting, or of all the rainbows which have filled windows this year to celebrate and show support for the NHS. In one sense, these were not things that we needed to do - but in another, we absolutely had to do them.

I normally write about technology, and technology may seem to have no place in these reflections, but I have one more thought I would like to share. I recently sent a link to the Google Blob Opera page to a friend who is (among many other things) a musician. (If you haven’t seen it, it’s a page where you can conduct a chorus of singing cartoon blobs - best to try it out.) He found it fun and funny - but had some mixed feelings about the use of AI to generate music. There are some difficult questions to answer about creativity, autonomy and art, but I won’t attempt to tackle them here. What I will say is that, in a tragic year, it is good to see that humans not only find time to make technical advances, but use them to make silly and unnecessary things that make people smile. If you need one extra burst of Christmas on New Year’s Eve, try watching this video.

The change of the year does not change everything, but I look forward to celebrating it with friends - and remembering those people who are not here to celebrate. The start of next year will still be hard, but I look forward to seeing what we as humans do to enhance our lives with things that we don’t need to do.

A Happy New Year to all.

(Views in this article are my own.)