Invent a holiday! Explain how and why everyone should celebrate.
I was watching a Hallmark movie the other day called The Christmas Quest. They are films you can very easily take your brain out to watch and I frequently do! The film itself was a very different example of the genre, being set in Iceland and reflecting on the genuine Icelandic myth of the 13 Yule Lads. It’s a great piece of folklore that I may base a blog on nearer Christmas. Anyway, at one point in the movie one of the characters mentioned Jólabókaflóð or Christmas Book Flood. This is a traditional celebration of reading where, on the night of Christmas Eve, people give books to each other and then settle down to read them. It’s a fantastic idea and it is the basis of my own holiday Childhood Reading Day.
Taking place on December 28 this new festival will give everyone a chance to recover from the excesses of Christmas, which I absolutely love by the way, and to spend time with family, friends or just your memories. You either find, buy or are given a book from your childhood that you loved and you spend as much time as you like rereading it on the day itself and maybe on the following days. Now that’s the personal part of the holiday. This holiday, however, is meant to be a time for sharing with those who are close to you. You can tell your partner, children, grandchildren or friends why this book means so much to you. Maybe share stories or thoughts about your younger self to allow others to find out something about what you were like as a child. I say that because all too often, in the West in particular, we criticise people for revisiting their childhood selves. We tell them to ‘grow up’ if they are watching or reading something for a younger age group, and forget how important those years are and how we should keep in touch with them. I think it comes from the Bible verse requiring us to ‘put away childish things’ which we have taken to mean that we need to completely cut our current selves off from our younger selves. We do this at our detriment because it is that attitude that removes a lot of the wonder from life.
The date is movable but the sentiment is one that we should hold to all year round. If you live in the UK, value children’s imagination and you want to encourage those who cannot otherwise access books to brighten up their lives, go to https://www.booktrust.org.uk/ and take a look at their Christmas appeal. If you live elsewhere there will be similar organisations in your country.
Happy Childhood Reading Day
What are your favorite websites?
I have been spending a lot of time on my phone like the majority of the people in the world! When I was in full time work I had reasons to put the phone to one side. Over the last two months I have had to deal with my tendency to pick up my phone too much. So, how have I done this?
The first thing I have tried is reading a book in the morning rather than reading a screen. To an extent it’s working, though not perfectly, but it has proved to be a good first step. It is far more relaxing reading a paperback or hardback book than it is to read a screen. For that reason Kindle always has been and always will be a non starter for me. Anyway, since I left work I have reread the first two books in Philip Pullman’s Book of Dust trilogy to remind myself of the story and I am now over halfway through the final book which I preordered in June. Along with that I have read The Barbecue at No 9 by Jennie Godfrey and reviewed it on my blog. I am now looking forward to reading my collection of Christmas books with some I reread year after year.
The next way I have kept off of the screen is to prepare my project of analysing Christmas Magazines from 1896 to 2025. I have finished looking through every page and noting the contents, and this week I will be getting my highlighters out and picking out common themes and contrasts that I find across the years. Now, of course, this does mean that later this month I will spend huge amounts of time writing and editing blog posts but I feel like that is an excellent use of my screen time.
The real game changer, however, came just over two weeks ago. I decided that my screen time was getting out of control, with Instagram, Twitter, Chrome, Fishdom (a game app) and Facebook being the main culprits. I found an app called ScreenZen and it’s worked incredibly well for me. Initially, I included 9 websites on the restricted list, (which I was visiting for a combined time of about 4 hours a day!) and set ScreenZen to a maximum of 40 minutes each. The more adept at mental arithmetic will have quickly realised that this would still give me no less than 6 hours of screen time if I hit those limits!! 😱😱 However, the clever part is that it forces you to wait for 10 seconds before opening it and displays a message like ‘Do you need to check this now?’ This is working brilliantly because it is a proper stopping cue straight away. Many times I think, ‘You know what? I don’t!’ and I leave it unopened. Even if I do open it I have a limited amount of time to use it so I really need to prioritise my phone use and actually use it for a purpose rather than mindlessly looking at an endless scroll. I now use these websites for a short focused time. The four hours of scrolling a day is now down to 45 minutes! Yesterday I restricted myself still further and reduced screen time on those apps to 4 opens of 7 minutes each. If you are interested in the psychology of this take a look at the Ted Talk below from Adam Alter. I used it year after year in my lessons and every year it had at least a temporary effect on my screen use!
The unrestricted sites I have and use most are Word Press, Calm, Duolingo and Happy Color. All four contribute to improving my mental health and wellbeing through relaxation and focus. I wholeheartedly recommend all four.
Is there an age or year of your life you would re-live?
I have never understood why people would want to relive part of their lives. It’s an idea that has so many problems. Let’s take them one by one.
First problem – Are you reliving this year with all the knowledge that you have now or simply being thrown back to the same time with the knowledge you had then? If it’s the first, you would be very tempted to change things. If it’s the second you would simply make the same mistakes and the whole thing would be a waste of time.
Second problem – If you do have knowledge of how things turned out, what would you do about it? Would you kiss that person you always wanted to? Would you take pre-emptive revenge on someone who made your life a misery? Would you do a Biff Tannen and use your knowledge of sports to build up a fortune? Depending on which year you chose, you might end up doing all three. I certainly would!
Third problem – Let’s say yes to the second problem and see where that takes us. You come back to the present and it’s a completely different present to the one you were in before. You have done different things and the world around you has changed irrevocably. Maybe you are married to the same person, except you would almost certainly have changed them in ways you can’t understand. You might have missed out on all the things that you value because you wanted to make things better.
The Solution – Charles Dickens had it right in A Christmas Carol. Ebenezer Scrooge could see his previous Christmases but only as an observer. He couldn’t change anything but he could learn from it. I would love to relive times from my life that way. Well, of course, I do that already as does everyone else. We reflect on things we have done, both good and bad, and try to repeat the first and avoid the second. When we look at a picture, when we talk to people about the ‘old days’, when we hear a song or when we watch a film or TV programme, we are back in those times. I have very fond memories of some years of my life – with, for example, 1975 being one and 1987 being another. I can travel back to those years in my head. Would I want to travel back in person? No way!
So, it’s October 31 and I am marking two months since I finished full time year round teaching. Time to reflect on what I have achieved, learnt and thought.
So, what have the last two months been like in terms of ticking off achievements or landmarks? Quite low key if I am being honest. I have ticked off the ambition of visiting the Stone Circle at Stonehenge and that was an amazing experience. I wouldn’t have been able to do that if I hadn’t stepped back from full time teaching. The blog is making a slightly bigger impact now that I am posting every day. The project to analyse Christmas magazines is going nicely and I should have some really interesting articles for December. Job wise I have signed up for work as a TV and Film extra, but unfortunately have not been able to take the two jobs offered due to them being the other side of London with such an early start that I couldn’t get there using public transport. I have registered availability for Action Challenge to help set up their charity challenges. I have also started the process of training to help young people develop their reading skills.
What have I learnt? First of all, how much 30 years of teaching has taken out of me! For the first couple of weeks I felt like I had way more energy, and I could feel myself relaxing day by day. However, with that relaxation and that unwinding process has come bouts of irritating infections, increasing rather than decreasing tiredness in the mornings and a lack of energy to enable me to push through it. My old joke about work used to be that it was only tension holding me together! Well, there appears to be a certain amount of truth to that. I compared notes with a former colleague who underwent the same process a year or so before me and he confirmed that he found that first few months exactly the same. He started off with a burst of energy and then ‘hit the wall’ in running parlance. I think that what has happened is that I, and most other people in this situation, feel the necessity to immediately replace work with something else that is productive. It seems to be a case of running before you can walk. I have accepted the fact that my family history projects are going to be postponed until early 2026.
What have my thoughts been about these first two months? I have a certain amount of discomfort, not to say mild guilt, about being a non contributor to the household in terms of earning. This is something I can’t yet get my head round. I think that if I am to make more sense of my new normal I need to try to find my inner Swiftie and shake it off! I feel like I have fairly successfully been able to do much more around the house and basically act like the house husband I was 20 years ago when Janet was working and I was looking after the children. However, I perhaps need to be able to accept that there will be days when I don’t do as much, and that is OK.
So, there you have it. I am a work in progress and I need to accept that. I never expected to be the finished article within two months of taking a new job, so it was unrealistic to expect to be the finished article within two months of completely changing my way of life. I need to recalibrate my goals and I need to be more accepting of slower progress. Things will improve, I just need to be patient.
See you in two months time when 2025 will be on its final day and I will be four months into my new life. Wish me luck!
What historical event fascinates you the most?
It won’t surprise many regular readers of my blog that the historical event that fascinates me has something to do with Christmas! However, the real fascination lies in its immediate effects and its long term repercussions.
The Christmas Truce took place in various places along the trenches of World War I between December 24 and 26 of 1914, the first Christmas of the war. It was a real event, but one which has had a layer of mythology placed over the top. It was likely that makeshift football games were played at certain points but they were probably nothing more than the type of playground games that had few rules and no real competitive elements. One thing is certain though. The soldiers did meet, they did sing carols, they did share food, drink and conversation and they did all this in honour of the birth of Jesus. Letters home from both sides attest to this. I have written a full post about this in the past so if you want the full story then take a read here. What I will finish with today are a few reflections on what the Christmas Truce meant and could have caused.
The first thing to say is that, apart from a few individuals with a natural bloodlust, very few troops go into battle wanting to kill. However, soldiers are taught to see the enemy as faceless entities who are simply a homogeneous mass of evil. The Christmas Truce blew this apart as the troops on both sides realised that they were fighting men exactly like themselves. Some of the Germans actually lived over in the UK before the war and knew the places familiar to the British troops. Once the human face of the enemy was revealed it caused a real conundrum. How could you fight people who you had made a personal connection with? The answer was that you couldn’t. In certain areas of the trenches the opposing sides warned each other of incoming fire or deliberately fired their guns over the tops of the trenches not in them.
The politicians and generals were extremely perturbed by the Christmas Truce and did their best to cover it up. They wanted the war to continue for their own purposes and they were quite happy to sacrifice not only ordinary working people but even many of their own contemporaries at public schools, sent to the front lines as junior officers. Their answer to the problem was to move entire battalions who had been infected by the goodwill of the Christmas Truce out of the trenches to be replaced by other troops with no personal connections to the other side. This, and their insistence on the ‘lie’ of the Truce, ended up ensuring that the war continued for nearly four more years at the loss of 8.4 million more lives.
The truth is that the humanity on show that Christmas was inconvenient for the war machines of both sides. When we remember those who died in 12 days time we must not forget that they were people like us who had family, friends, dreams and ambitions. They were brave but only because they were given no other choice by people who didn’t have to be brave.
Below is the link to my earlier post with a reflection on the event I put together at my local football club. It’s a great read.
David Pearce - Popular Culture and Personal Passions 