Splitting the Christmas Season

Christmas is supposed to be a time for family, or so it is said. But what do you do when you have more than one family who wants your time over the holiday?

I’m not talking specifically of children who have to deal with separated parents, - though that is something to be considered – but rather bog standard couples trying to split their time between both sides of the family. How do you keep everyone happy?

This problem is one I have come across for the first time this year, as I have had to decide how to split my time between my family and my girlfriend’s.  It was all sorted in the end – I will spend Christmas with my family, the days between Boxing Day and New Year’s Eve with hers, and then she will come back to mine - but trying to figure out how to split myself was quite a headache I can tell you.

I think in the end it comes down to the fact that for the majority of people family is still the most important thing. However much people may argue otherwise, and however much society may have tried to disprove this, I think it is still the case.

It has been suggested that nowadays, with the majority of people no longer living where they grew up and instead moving away and setting up their own life, family ties are no longer as important as they were a hundred years or so ago, when people lived and grew up in the same place. Now, while that does sometimes still happen, people largely “fly the nest” and create their own life and social circle somewhere else, learning to become self-sufficient. But I don’t think that means that people don’t still think that family is important.

If this was the case, then I don’t think people would make such a big effort to maintain family ties at Christmas and at other times of the year. We may not see as much of our families as we used to, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t still important to us. And thanks to modern telecommunications (email and Skype and so on) it is possible to maintain contact with family members, no matter how faraway they live, allowing for the old ties to be maintained even if you do move away for whatever reason.

Trying to figure out how to split yourself between various family members is never going to be easy, and it is never going to be possible to please everyone at once. Someone is inevitably going to be left out and disappointed and if you have somehow managed to please everyone else then you are going to find yourself with no time for yourself. But the fact that people still make the effort, rather than just throwing up their hands and giving up, proves, at least as far as I am concerned, that for most people family is still very important, even if you only get to see them once a year.

 

It's Time To Take Responsibility

There’s a phrase in environmental politics called Nimbyism, which stands for Not In My Back Yard.  In essence it means that people want renewable energy projects such as wind farms to be built, provided of course, they aren’t built anywhere near them.

The problem is, this is not a problem unique to sustainable energy projects. In all walks of life, people want things, but aren’t willing to pay the price for them. If you survey a group of people and ask them if they want the government to invest more money in schools and hospitals, then they will inevitably be in favour. But if you ask them if they would be willing to pay higher taxes in order for this to happen, they are inevitably against it.

We have become a society that expects something for nothing. It didn’t use to be like this. In my grandparents’ time, - the first generation to get a free university education – they believed in hard graft. If you had something, it was because you had worked for it, paid your share and sacrificed for it. It we had asked them if they were ok with wind farms, they would probably not have liked the idea, but they would have managed.

In contrast we now live in what I have come to think of as an X-Factor society. We have come to expect that everything we want, everything we desire, will just be handed to us. We consider that celebrity and fame are ours by right, rather than something to be earned. We want the benefits of society, but we don’t want to have to pay our way. We believe that because we are so magic and special it’s not our responsibility.

Not everyone of course. A lot of people are more than willing to take responsibility for their actions. But enough aren’t to cause a problem. Perhaps if people had thought about the effects of their actions, we wouldn’t be in some of the messes that we are in now. If we want to return to a stronger, fairer society, the one that made Britain respected around the globe, then we have to go back to the way things used to be. We have to return to the traditions that once made us great, that can still make us great again.

We have to stop putting the blame on others, and start taking responsibility for our own actions. We have to stop believing that we are entitled to something in exchange for nothing, and put in the effort. We have to accept that – in the words of my favourite US Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jnr – “taxes are the price we pay for a civilised society.”

If we truly wish to leave behind a better world for the generations to come then we must start setting up that world now. And it falls to this generation to create it, and if necessary pay the cost of it.

It’s time to take up our responsibilities.