GUEST BLOG: Ruby – Sweetening a bitter Christmas

3
2

lonely_santa_by_ascendedguard

It’s that time of year again, the time when my newsfeed fills with the smiling faces of the once yearly visited elderly, the adult men and women tired but cheery after too much wine, and the recycled laughter of inside jokes with longtime kin. The chubby cheeked children clasping presents in sticky fingered glee and arrays of extravagant food that inspire the ever year New Years resolution to battle the middle aged spread.

But even as I scroll through muttering about slave labour for cheap consumer goods, wrapping paper clogging up land fills, hormones pumped into chickens, and the materialistic marketing scam that is Christmas  I know I’d give my morals away in a heartbeat to be a part of it.

Christmas is about people, it’s about family and belonging, whatever that may look like wherever that may be. It’s about having a part in a coming together.

Typically I have remedied this by finding a place to fit among the misfits of the season. I’ve woven myself between the after threads of society orphaned by death, disease, dispute, and dysfunction. Full of festive cheer we are the grinches you encounter raving about the ills of consumerism and sanctimoniously chewing back tasteless cardboard textured tofurkey to the avoid the chicken hormones we secretly hope will poison you all. We have learnt to engage with Christmas by opposing it, that is our place to fit and it’s ok.

But what about the people who don’t have any place?

What about the people who are in a new country? A new culture, a new community, a new start?

Alone.

TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com

Even in my grinch like pre-festive state I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. I’m talking about another group of people with much less to celebrate than I.

I’m talking about the refugees.

Not the ones you see in the news running across borders and huddled in groups in tents, I’m talking about the one that might live next door to you, the one that takes their child to the park down the road, the one that stands behind you in the checkout.

I’m talking about our refugees here now.

A common misconception is that refugees arrive then they bring their family over to be with them but this is not the case. Sometimes families are torn apart by war or separated by safety concerns, in any case there are many reasons why a refugee would end up in NZ alone. The guidelines for family reunionification are strict, they typically involve children without gaurdians or those who are ill without caregivers. In short it’s not a straight up family reunion and these applicants have urgent needs for family support. The process is long and tenuous but once completed a small number of applications are approved. These refugees, OUR citizens, are now seperated only by finances from the ones they love at Christmas. While my misfits and I mentally gesticulate the multiple complex and time consuming roads back to familial redemption and the time, and energy that would take, there is a group of people whose souls hurt like ours over a measly plane fare.

That’s not right, it’s too easy to fix, it’s too uncomplicated to be fair.

So if those of us who are seperated from our family, can put aside our December bitterness to donate to reunite these families, then how much more can you understand the importance of family?

As you cram your family into the living room this year to unwrap presents made by slave labour, make a neat pile of Christmas wrap to clog a landfill and then hoe into your hormone filled chicken, please take a moment this year to think of the refugees that live amoung us already alone this Christmas and donate part of an airfare to an Auckland refugee family trust to reunite someone else’s family this year.

Give the gift of family this year because even us grinches know that’s what Christmas is really about.

 

 

Ruby is 24 years old, sex worker and social activist. Lives in Auckland

3 COMMENTS

  1. Ruby is also a bloody good writer. And from what I can tell, a bloody good human being. Put me off my chicken though. And I only have one chicken. I call her Clucky Picky. My problem is ? Shall I wring or shall I chop ? Hmmm ?

    • Don’t worry about the chicken Countryboy, there is no “hormone filled chicken” on supermarket shelves in NZ. There used to be, but there hasn’t been for quite some time

Comments are closed.