Sometime in October stores start putting out Christmas decorations, in November they slowly begin to play festive music and by December people organise office parties and exchange festive cards.  For the best part of the last few decades these festive conventions seem to play a pivotal role in the lead up to Christmas.  There are jumpers with messages, boxes of chocolates and sweets all designed to spread some festivity around.  For those working, studying, or both, their December calendar is also a reminder of the first real break for some since summer. 

The lead up to Christmas with the music, stories and wishes continues all the way to the New Year when people seem to share their goodwill around.  Families have all sorts of traditions, putting up the Xmas tree on this day, ordering food from the grocers on that day, sending cards to friends and family by that day.  An arrangement of dates and activities.  On average every person starts in early December recounting their festive schedule. Lunch at mum’s, dinner at my brother’s, nan on Boxing Day with the doilies on the plates, New Years Eve at the Smiths where Mr Smith gets hilariously drunk and starts telling inappropriate jokes and New Year’s at the in-laws with their sour-faced neighbour.

People arrange festivities to please people around them; families reunite, friends are invited, meaningful gifts are bought for significant others and of course buy we gifts for children.  Oh, the children love Christmas! The lights, the festive arrangements, the delightful activities, and the gifts!  The newest trends, the must have toys, all shiny and new, wrapped up in beautiful papers with ribbons and bows.  In the festive season, we must not forget the kind words we exchange, the messages send by local communities, politicians and even royalty.  Words full of warmth, well-meaning, perspective and reflection.  Almost magical the sights and sounds wrapped around us for over a month to make us feel festive.

It is all too beautiful, so you can be forgiven to hardly notice the lumbering shadow, at the door of an abandoned shop.  Homelessness is not a lifestyle as despicably declared by a Conservative councillor/newspapers decades ago.  It is the human casualty of those who have been priced out in the war of life.  Even since the world went into a deep freeze due to the recession over a decade ago and the world is still in the clutches of that freeze.  More people read about Christmas stories in books and in movies, because an even increasing number of people do not share the experience.  Homelessness is the result of years of criminal indifference and social neglect that leads more people to live and experience poverty.  A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of homelessness.  There is no goodwill at the inn whilst the sins of the “father” are now returning in the continent!  Centuries of colonial oppression across the world lead to a wave of refugees fleeing exploitation, persecution, and crippling poverty.  Unlike the inn-keeper and his daughter, the roads are closed, and the passages are blocked.  Clearly, they don’t fit with the atmosphere… nor do the homeless.  Come to think of it, neither do the old people who live alone in their cold homes.  None of these fit with the festive narrative.

As I walked down a street I passed a homeless guy is curled up in a shop door.  A combination of cardboard, sleeping bag and newspapers all jumbled together.  Next to him a dog on the cardboard and around them fairy lights.  This man I do not know, his face I have not seen, his identity I ignore; but I imagine that when he was born, there was someone who congratulated his mother for having a healthy boy.  Now he is alone, fortunate to have a canine companion, as so many do not have anyone. What stands out is that this person, who our festive plans had excluded, is there with his fairy lights, maybe the most festive of all people, without a burgundy coat, I hear some people like these days.    

It is so difficult to say Merry Christmas this year.  In a previous entry the world cup and its aftermath left a bitter taste in those who believe in making a better world. The economic gap between whose who have and those who do not, increases; the social inequalities deepen but I feel that we can be like that man with the fairy lights, fight back, rise up and end the party for those who like to wear burgundy, or those who like to speak for world events, at a price.

Merry Christmas, my dear criminologists, the world can change, when we become the agents of change.