My Wish List for Christmas

Walking through Montreal in Christmastime is beautiful. Even I, someone who normally doesn’t appreciate kitschy decorations of angels and all the energy-consuming corny lights, found myself in Christmas spirit the other day. I was walking through this city, which has been my home for more than 4 months now, safely covered in layers of warm clothing and scarves, enjoying the snow which makes this city look so clean and peaceful. I was thinking about how lucky I am. So lucky to be free, to be able to go wherever I want to go. A great wave of satisfaction rippled over me. Musing on my plans for the next three weeks of vacation, I turned the corner. There my daydreaming was abruptly interrupted and my feelings changed.

I bumped into a man carrying a cup with some coins in it asking me to give him some money for a smile. I give him a dollar and on the man’s face appears an almost completely toothless smile. Smiling back, I ask the man where he is going to sleep tonight. He shrugs his shoulders and makes a little head movement towards the entrance of the metro. Then the man walks away from me, trying to sell his smile to a couple passing by. Both are neatly dressed and hanged with shopping bags, full of Christmas presents I assume. They don’t even look at the poor man. The man turns around and lifts his eyebrows at me while shrugging his shoulders again. And with this last look of recognition and another smile we part ways.

Continuing my walk, I am still thinking about how lucky I am. But my mood has changed. A great feeling of injustice overwhelms me. How come people have enough money to buy each other meaningless gifts, but too little to give to the people who sleep in the undergrounds of the city? I look at the city through a very different lens now; where I saw the white city as beautiful, clean and peaceful before, I now see injustice everywhere. The billboards screaming “buy Buy BUY!!!”, frowning parents pulling their whining children forward, the many Santa Clauses in every mall, Mariah Carry in the background, even the Christmas decorations are bothering me now.

The complete ignorance that speaks from this all annoys me. I think of the stories my Palestinian friend told me last week about horrible things that happened to him in the past. I think of Afghanistan and how it always seem to be the innocent civilians that get killed in this war on terrorism. I think of Africa and how many people are dying every day from hunger and in wars we do not even know about. I think of all this misery in places far from here, but I also think of the homeless in Montreal. And about the hardening society in The Netherlands which seems to become less and less tolerant. I think about how I try to keep up with knowing about all the injustice in the world and how this gets more and more impossible; the more I know, the more it grows over my head. I feel incompetent and useless; not able to fool myself with the usually comforting ‘I do what I can’-kind of thinking. The earlier so peaceful Christmas spirit has turned into a hideous ghost that haunts me.

I wish I could change the world and make it a better place for everyone. I wrote about it many times before. But writing about it doesn’t really help. It just gives me the feeling of doing something. So I decided that this time I am going to ask you, my readers, for help. Instead of sending me a Christmas card or present, I want you to spend that money and energy on something or someone else, to improve our world a little bit. Send a child in Africa to school for a year. Adopt an olive tree in Palestine. Go visit lonely people in your street and listen to their stories. Or just try to put a smile on the faces of people walking by, by singing a song or giving them a compliment for example. Be creative, be free! And always remember how lucky you are. There is never to much love in the world.

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