21 Dec All grown-ups were first children but few of them remember it
It’s Christmas week,
We talk about the magic of Christmas we associate it with light and peace, we even go so far as to say that it is a state of mind: it awakens in us, every year, a certain nostalgia for childhood .
Magic, love, donation, sharing, gifts…
It can also be a time when we feel very lonely, or the consumer frenzy can make us dizzy until we forget that Santa Claus lives in the North Pole… and not in China.
What can we say about this 2020 edition, when we know that Christmas is above all about being together… when the health situation would make the implementation of this definition irresponsible towards those we love.
In the past, one of the charms of Christmas Eve was to tell tales and legends to the youngest.
These little seeds of dreams planted in our childhood memories have for some of them been evolutionary companions.
Their buried resonance reappears in a variable way according to the periods of our lives and the vibrations of the world.
Today, it’s a children’s tale that I would like to share: a kind of invitation to prove to ourselves that we are among those who remember being little.
I am thinking of a tale published in 1947 by Michèle Colmont.
This is the story of Michka, a little teddy bear, who on Christmas night runs away from his mistress, a spoiled little girl who mistreats him.
He finds himself in the snow and the cold and discovers the world and the life that surrounds him. During his wanderings, he meets the Christmas Reindeer and his sleigh loaded with toys and learns that in the tradition of this particular night everyone must do a good deed, help his fellow man, repair injustices … He decides to help the Reindeer to distribute the gifts in each house.
Arrived in front of the last, a miserable hut in which lives a sick little boy, there is no toy left in the big bag.
So Michka gives up his freedom to become a toy again.
Timeless and melancholy, this tale has marked generations of children who have grown up. The concept of good deed is an incentive to exchange and to practice generosity and sharing.
The terminology is perhaps a little primary and outdated but in our daily life as adults in action it is to be hoped that we do some that are related to it: to meditate, in the perspective of the traditional taking of good end of year resolutions!
When Antoine de St Exupéry dedicated his mythical work The Little Prince
to French novelist and journalist Léon Werth, he made it clear that his dedication was addressed to him “when he was a little boy”.
It is modestly to this part of ourselves that I wish a very Merry Christmas!
At the beginning of January, I will resume a more “classic” editorial line to continue to share “adult” food for thought that will allow us to start a new year that will soon begin under auspices that we can only wish better.
* Antoine de St Exupéry
