Autumn has just begun (at least the calendar one) and the first, though yet thin, boulletins full of pictures of possible Christmas presents start to appear. Programmes for children suddenly lack addvertisments on yoghurt and other diary products and big and expensive toys are attacking your kids´ imagination. Even the small cheap shops now offer Christmas decorations. O–ho-ho! Christmas brain massage has just started.
I don´t know if you share my experience but I think that this Christmas massage starts earlier and earlier every year. Maybe the shop keepers have no other occassion to offer seasonal goods – I suppose there is no such a big festival in Czech autumn (in America they have at least Helloween). So they massage your childrens´ brains and your purses and wallets from the early October. What is waiting for you at the end?
Christmas is approaching much slowlier that the advertisments and at the end you must quickly switch off the television precisely at 8 to save your children from the information that it is parents who BUY the Christmas presents. Untill they do not know you may repulse their attacks by presenting a sheet of paper to stick and draw their demands on it and send it to the little Jesus or Santa Claus or Father Christmas or whatever is here to shift your responsibility to. At the moment they get to know not only that your children lose the fairytale connected to Christmas but also the Christmas brain massage finishes and the Christmas brainwash starts.
How does it look like? The massage continues from everywhere. You are never safe. The TV, magazines, adds, shopping centres, friends. They all discuss the same thing: Christmas presents. The result is disasterous. Your brain is empty. It is washed from any other thoughts. You seek the expensive presents your children do not need. You frantically run through the shops and try to buy any presents for ALL the people on your Christmas list.
When I sang in a chorus I asked the choirmaster once before Christmas why we did not sing any Christmas carols. I claimed that people liked them. The choirmaster´s answer surprised me. He said: People can hear them in every supermarket and shopping centre. They are fed up with them.
I think that when the real Christmas comes people are not fed up only with the carols. They are fed up with Christmas itself. All the seasonal cleaning, making Christmas cookies and cakes, shopping around for whatever may stand for a suitable Christmas present and mainly the Christmas atmosphere washing our brain to that state of mind when we are able to buy anything devastated the real Christmas. Get rid off it all. The real Christmas is in your heart.
Andrea Leskotová
