John Lapsley ponders the festival of Christmas and the sadness and sense of loss in those for whom its "stories" no longer chime.
This week as I walked past the open door of Arrowtown's community hall carol concert, its choir chopped the legs from under me.
They were singing 'Silent Night, Holy Night', that eerily soft, sad and nostalgic carol that somehow takes our hearts back to what was, and to what might have been.
Carols do this. While spreading their Christmas joy, they also poke and prod at a buried, gnawing sadness.
It occurs to me the following will ring no bells with some - but there are many who feel the power of this Christmas black dog growling inside ourselves, and probably reveal the knowledge of it with our instinctive understanding that this is the worst of times for people to be left alone.
I think the depth of this strange sadness is actually the reflection of the sheer magnificence of the Christmas our Western society unwittingly constructed when it combined into one unmatched festival both the faith of the magical birth-of-Christ story and the faith of the children's similarly magical Santa Claus legend.
Of course, we leave our childhood behind. And many of us have surrendered our faith to the rational explanations of science.
It all adds up to a great deal that we leave behind and miss at Christmas.
The plot and the character components of the Baby Jesus story are so powerful I suspect J. K.
Rowling, when she compares her storytelling powers, goes and hides herself shamefaced in a cupboard each Christmas Eve.
The story ... Well, once in Royal David's city, a humble but noble couple are so rejected that while the perfect wife is heavily pregnant, they have to sleep in a stable.
The infant boy born so insalubriously that night is not just a fairy-story prince lying on a bed of hay - he is to become the most shining king the world has seen.
While the evil King Herod sets about murdering the innocents, the guiding star of a new world leads wise men and shepherds, rich men and poor men, to pay homage and bring gifts to a noble young prince who will die cruelly in fulfilling his destiny.
It's not bad, is it? To this powerful Christmas story we've added on the Santa Claus legend.
Our children, sick with anticipation, wait like innocent cargo cultists for the reindeer and the treasure sleigh to touch down on the roof.
But they also hear the carols, they gaze at the Christmas tree, they see the doting wonder-struck parents, and more than at any other time, they must know they are loved.
Most people remember the moment they realised Santa was a big fat (delicious) lie.
I was 7, and going on holidays with my brother and two cousins, crammed with the tent in the back seat of an ancient Vauxhall Wyvern.
The younger cousin, aged 9, informed me with the scorn of the newly wise that Santa was a load of bollocks, while his slightly older brother, who'd twigged that little kids were meant to believe, tried to shoosh him.
Perhaps the moment my older cousin joined this conspiracy was also the second that for him, the sad tinge of knowing began.
But we grow up, and within a few years we also leave a faith and create a hole we often don't quite realise exists.
Still, I think many at least sense this emptied space at Christmas, the most emotional time in the Christian calendar.
So there is a feeling of double loss at Christmas as we participate in two important festivals that have lost huge slabs of personal meaning.
Our society has become so correctly secular that we know somewhere this week there must be PCs objecting to the thoughtlessness of carols in municipal halls, particularly if they are near synagogues or mosques - probably they're the same people who wish others "Happy Holidays" so as not to offend those whose choice in life is being offended.
I don't take huge offence at the commercialisation of Christmas as it expands with cheerful paganism into the space left by the diminishing Christian festival.
But those small children brought up today celebrating and believing in only the Santa Christmas festival, can't feel that other level of wonder, and will never know they missed it.
There's some compensation. They'll also feel only half that Christmas melancholy.
- John Lapsley is an Arrowtown writer.
