It is only a week now until the best day of the year.
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It’s the day when we can stop thinking about what we do not have and revel in what we do.
It’s the day when there are no after-school activities, no appointments, no paperwork, no pressing need to spend all our energies on things that keep us busy from morning to night on 364 days of the year.
It is a day when we are allowed to have a reprieve from the never-ending noise of the world we live in.
Instead, we can look at each other and remember what it is we do all this for.
This year, as in so many other years, there have been incidents in the weeks leading up to Christmas that have made us think.
There is a city block in Sydney now covered in flowers marking a day and a night that terrified us all. The sight of those numbed faces in the window, with
just a pane of glass between them and the rest of their lives – it is something that makes you feel sick at what we can be capable of.
Two shoes, bloodied, sitting in a school building in Pakistan where 130 children have been killed. One-hundred-and-thirty children, children that will not see this Christmas – however meagre – or any of those to come.
If it was you in the Lindt Chocolate Cafe, which faces would you be thinking of? Who would you give anything to come out alive for? Your child, your partner, your mum, your dad – whoever it is, hold on to that feeling on Christmas Day when you are able to hug them.
And, for me, I remind myself to look into their eyes, to see and to listen to what they have to say. Because so often, that noise gets in the way, that noise of being late, of remembering things, of phones and televisions and iPads.
The noise is – in the end – not important.
What is important is those eyes and those feelings and the people that you love.
Like most Australian families, ours now embraces members from far way – from Holland, Tahiti and Tanzania. These are people who know different cultures and different ways of life.
But they are our people. Because at the heart of it all, we are the same.
We are human, for better or worse.
On this one day, we can let go of the anger and the fear.
Merry Christmas, from myself, my family and all the team here at the Namoi Valley Independent.
Marie Low, editor