Gleaming images of beautiful families assail us everywhere around December time. Positive messages and good cheer seemingly abound. Beneath the surface, however, there are grimmer realities. Consider the food wastage. In 2014, 4.2 million Christmas dinners were wasted across the United Kingdom according to Unilever. The most startling popular statistic, and the most worrying, is that of the “Christmas Suicide”. This statistic, that there are increased rates of suicide attempts in the holiday season, is a popular myth and has been debunked by several authorities. However, it is pervasive. Why is this so?
Through one perspective, the “Christmas Suicide” myth could be interpreted as reflecting a deep unease and anxiety about the holiday season. Beneath apparent happiness, we are told, there lurk tragedy and depths of despair. Happiness is a bubble, reality is sadness. We are only separated from suffering by a hair’s breadth, for we too could be contemplating demise by our own hand. Is it human nature to be unable to keep away thoughts of suffering during our most special and happiest moments? Or is the experience of suffering that we have gone through to build family relationships an unavoidable and irrepressible memory?
Such questions deserve more thought. However, my opinion is that the Christmas suicide myth rests on a cultural idea of loneliness that is used to depict the anti-social elements in society as dangerous. It is the lack of friends and family, we are told, that leads an individual to murder him or herself. This lack leads to a deep and hopeless despair. This singling out of the lonely betrays a complacency which the social individual possesses and an unflinching and unwarranted trust and belief in social arrangements. He or she is surrounded by people in the holiday season and anything else appears both perverse and dangerous, a threat to life, society and the individual. But what of the loneliness of the crowd? Of never being able to express to others what is inside, or to feel a true companionship? Such feelings are buried and displaced onto the Christmas suicide in a convenient fashion.
By all means, think of those that are not as lucky as you in Christmas time. Empathise with the less fortunate and the lonely. However, do pay attention to the differences between cultural myths and prosaic realities. When you are enjoying time with the family and friends, pause to think how much you are the real, happy you and how much you are simply a character in a story about Christmas and its insiders and outsiders.
diary of a lone man 