Each December, a “magical” transformation takes place.
Shopping malls glow. Supermarkets erupt in tinsel and artificial snow. Secret Santa budgets quietly exceed monthly groceries. Social media fills with curated trees, coordinated pyjamas, and aesthetic charity drives. For one month, we behave as though kindness has entered the national bloodstream.
And yet the question we almost never ask is this: are we witnessing the real magic of Christmas, or its most elaborate illusion?
We do not live in a country of winter. There is no snow to justify our fantasy. No frozen streets, no breath hanging visibly in the air, no reason, climatic or cultural, as to why December should feel different from November. And yet we borrow the entire aesthetic of Christmas from colder, wealthier worlds and paste it onto tropical reality with unquestioning enthusiasm. We pay for outrageously-priced “winter” menus in 30-degree Celsius heat, artificial pine trees in concrete apartments, and hot chocolate with all the trimmings.
But if Christmas magic still works without winter, without geography, and often without religion, then its power clearly lies elsewhere. Not in tradition. Not in theology. But in human psychology. And psychology, when exploited cleverly enough, becomes commerce. In other words, December is the month when guilt becomes profitable. We buy to compensate for absence. We spend to translate affection into currency. We purchase closure for relationships we neglected all year. Then, days later, returns flood the counters (proof that we were never certain what we were buying in the first place!). An economy thrives on that confusion: emotional hunger converted into transactions.
And we play along, calling it generosity. But real generosity does not require credit limits. It does not leak plastic into landfills. It does not arrive wrapped in logos. What we are practising most of the time is not generosity; rather, it is ritualised consumption with moral branding.
We know this. We joke about it. And we still do it. Because even a hollow version of giving feels better than confronting how selectively we care. We insist that the spirit of Christmas is compassion. Yet, for eleven months of the year, compassion is treated as an inconvenience. We step past it in traffic. We scroll past it on our screens. We outsource it to NGOs. Then, in December, we rehearse it publicly and return it to storage in January.
And what of religion? In Sri Lanka - a country of Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Catholics, Zoroastrians, and an equal and growing number of followers of lay, pop-up religions and their skeptics - the narrative of Christmas maintains an emotional pull. Our countrymen exchange gifts, host dinners, and give to charity in “the spirit of Christmas”. That alone explodes one of our most comfortable assumptions: the power of Christmas does not belong to Christianity alone. Far from being a religious inheritance, the Christmas spirit is a human one.
If that be the case (and December proves it every year!), then why must empathy be seasonal? Why must generosity require festive permission? Why do we suddenly discover humanity only when accompanied by fairy lights and background music? Perhaps because sustained compassion is disruptive.
In Sri Lanka, sustained compassion would require us to confront inconvenient truths: that some celebrate with overflowing tables while others calculate meals. That some children unwrap toys imported from three continents, while others watch Christmas pass from relief queues, construction sites, and pavements. That charity has become a performance for Instagram, not a commitment to justice. And still we decorate.
My father once said that a person must be blessed even to have the opportunity to give. With age, that sentence has become less comforting and more disturbing. It means that every festive act of generosity is also proof of surplus of money, safety, energy, and stability. It also means that many never get the luxury of seasonal kindness at all. We light our homes while others ration electricity. We debate gift lists while others debate survival. We preach gratitude while refusing to question the systems that decide who must practise it daily.
And we call this season magical.
So, let us be honest: what kind of magic is this? Is it comfort - a collective emotional anaesthetic for a year of exhaustion? Is it commerce - a sophisticated machine that converts sentiment into sales? Or is it conscience - a brief awakening of moral awareness that quickly returns to sleep? Perhaps it is all three. And perhaps that is precisely the problem. Because if Christmas truly awakens conscience, then the real indictment is not that December feels special, but that the rest of the year does not.
We do not lack the capacity for kindness. We lack the discipline to sustain it when it is no longer decorative. Strip Christmas of its imported glitter, its advertising budgets, its religious exclusivity, and its shopping festivals, and one truth remains stubbornly visible: people still want to reach one another. Still want to give. Still want to feel gratitude and act with compassion. That impulse is not Christian. Neither is it Western. It is in fact human.
Which leads to the most uncomfortable question of all: If we can behave this way in December, what is our excuse for the other eleven months?
The real magic of Christmas may not be that it changes the world for a few weeks. The real magic is that it exposes, every single year, the people we are capable of being, and silently asks why we resist being them for the rest of our lives.
