No sound sweeter than the blues:

We do Christmas wrong. The sad, nostalgic time is meant to be All Saints´ Day, and Halloween; and similar festivals in other religions except islam (as islam is a personality cult and doesn´t follow the rhythms of Nature in its holidays).

Christmas, or the winter solstice festival, is meant to be beyond that point of tears for the dead, memorials, and balance of the year (which belong to the end of the harvest time). The end of december however, is a turning point in that process, because the sun rises again and days grow longer; it´s a time to regain joy and to share hopes that cold, darkness and (in the past) scarcity of food, will pass and the first signs of rebirth are starting to show.

So Christmas should be more like Yule or Saturnalia, a very vitalistic carnival where the centre of the action is not at home but outside in the open. The sad Christmas culture is at odd with both the natural cycles and the Christian metanarrative; a Child is born, not mourned.

This change of paradigm would help people with suicidal tendencies no doubt, because they could rely on Christmas to cope with long winter nights, instead of this frightening visit of ghosts of past, present and future Christmas to lonely people for many nights. Many times you do wrong by trying to do good; and Charles Dickens did a lot more wrong than good with his damned Christmas Carol. I say: Deck the halls with boughs of holly. Have fun, have sex, don´t go near a church at midnight as they are too close to graveyards, and celebrate Nativity of a new cycle instead of the death of this year.