I cannot quite put it all together myself, but somehow, a fire here in town yesterday put me to thinking about Christmas spirit. We play up the holidays so, every year producing new feel-good movies, and old classics doing their best to light a small fire of Christmas spirit in us all. I am already jumping ahead of myself, though.
Yesterday, Christmas Eve, though few around here know what that means beyond having a few strange decorations for sale in the supermarket, the fire truck came rumbling through town headed straight for the Sanjiang Drum Tower. When I looked out the window and saw smoke rising from about the right (or wrong, I guess) spot, I grabbed my camera and ran to the site.
Sanjiang Drum Tower, when built, the tallest Dong drum tower, though other counties are trying to break that record, sets on the edge of a steep slope close to the river's edge. That slope was completely on fire. I am assuming, from the attitude of the police and fire department officers there that there was not any real danger, but I am not so firm a believer that I would not think it was a show to help the public feel better. Who knows. It was obviously close, as you can see in the photo below.
I started thinking about the potential destruction of the fire which burnt away the hillside near the drum tower. Somehow, a Christmas Eve fire destroying one of the finest drum towers to be found among the Dong people sounded far too close to a plot for a new Christmas movie. Maybe even a little "Wonderful Life"-like what-if scenarios in the movie would really bring out the potential destruction had it not been for the firemen standing on the top edge of the hills preventing the fire from spreading up and consuming the tower.
I know, that is a little imaginative, and probably would not make much of a movie, but it did get me to thinking.
The problem with the plot would be that "Christmas spirit" is not really an idea here. What is the Christmas spirit? I think Dickens summed it up well when he said in his Christmas Carol that it is "the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys."
Christmas is somewhat of a reminder to break out of our habitual selfish thought and look to others. We are all connected, whether we like it or not, because we are all on the same journey, as Dickens put it.
We all seem to be Scrooges at heart, I think. We have an incredible potential to isolate our thoughts and efforts into one direction, be it money, power, or whatever, and justify our lives away in pursuit of our one selfish aim. However, we all are also like Scrooge in that we have such great potential to turn and choose a different path. Let us hope we can learn this lesson with less promting than Scrooge, for I do not wish visitations from long-dead friends on any of us as a means to change.
China has the Christmas decorations, but they do not have the pleasant Christmas reminders we have in the West. One thing is common: Chinese, Western, and all mankind all have a frightening lack of what we will call "Christmas spirit." We could all use a little more.
