Extended family get-togethers at Christmas time are always fun. Many of us of a certain age find it boringly interesting to compare physical and mental notes, a year on every time, which is more or less the frequency of our annual encounters with distant relatives.

The short seem to get shorter, the taller lankier, the balding are now unquestionably bald and the wrinkled go about with more pasta on their faces than they can stomach at lunch-time these days.

Serious subjects such as dementia and failing muscles become major sources of merriment mixed with some alcohol-diluted discussion, which at least says a lot for some people’s sense of humour.

“I don’t remember you”, a fast-ageing aunt blurts out at one of us less elderly as we talked in the vicinity of a small crowd of bemused nephews and nieces lost in a conversation of their own over smartphones and i-Pads. “Now, where did I leave my handbag?”

“I am that so-and-so cousin’s son, Maria’s first offspring, auntie,” comes in the reply, the speaker making it obvious he has long forgotten her name. She is still not so sure that she actually carried her handbag on leaving home.

More cousins, nephews and nieces, part of a growing and ageing clan, compare notes too. Some have bulging tummies, others have simply expanded all over. Girls have become women of all shapes and sizes, and boys have bloomed into middle-aged men with a complex about their manhood and the unheralded advent of hair on every inch and inside every cavity of their bodies except the head.

Great-grandparents, those of them left, no longer feature, as they prefer to remain inside their residential homes where they feel a lot more at home than anywhere else, but they are still referred to in most conversations as if they are omnipresent.

It is an annual scene many of us experience, regardless of our views of Yuletide celebrations. Families may grow and extend, but they still feel the need to re-engage at some time, with the relevant psychological and social debate that occurs as different generations congregate to wish happy holidays to one another.

There are also the personal, little perceptions with which one has to contend as a member of the Third Age. In-between baby-sitting sessions with nephews and nieces, one is often obliged to resort to some fight-back tactics. When, for example, I make it clear that I am too busy to be at home when it is proposed that the kids are brought in, with my wife facing the music – if you can describe children running around, singing, shouting, farting and generally causing mayhem as such – there is always this confused look by way of retort.

You see, at this stage in our lives, according to one of my daughters, a nannu is expected to sport a white “Father Christmas” beard, have rosy-red cheeks, an ample belly and a small, ugly dog to fetch his slippers in front of the telly. If you say you have meetings, work to do and appointments to keep, it’s as if you’ve just admitted to smoking grass when the expression is so Sixties that it provokes images of dinosaurs and flower-shirted hippies.

Nanna is ok, of course. She is always there, happy to greet the kids, take them to the park, ever so patient and playful, and yet still managing to regularly visit her beautician and hairdresser. No one expects her to go grey, exhibit a rolling tummy and be waited upon by a bored animal.

As a teenager I was a bit of a romantic twit and remember that Lovers of the World Unite, a 1966 hit by British pop duo David & Jonathan, was one of my favourite songs of the time. Can’t someone like Freddie Portelli or one of his contemporaries come up with a song Grandpas of the World Unite? It would make a good debate during the family party next Christmas.....

 

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This year’s Christmas story

I am always looking for the best human story in the media during the Christmas period. The one that really caught my eye in the past few days was that of a busboy (for those who don’t know the term, a busboy/busgirl, busser or bus person in North America is a person who works in the restaurant and catering industry clearing tables, taking dirty dishes to the dishwasher, setting tables and otherwise assisting the waiting staff) who returned $3,000 in cash he found in the diner where he worked.

Johnny Duckworth, known as Thumper, had spotted the cash-packed envelope lying on the floor. It was later discovered it had been dropped by regular client Darrell Cox as he left after having had a quick breakfast. The busboy picked the packet up and immediately handed the money to his boss who found a pay slip inside and returned it to the bank from where the client had withdrawn it.

The beauty of the story is that Thumper’s honesty was rewarded not just by the grateful client, who gave him $300 with a note saying “Merry Christmas to a super honest guy”, but also by well-wishers who joined forces to successfully raise three times the sum of money found in the envelope to give to him as a Christmas bonus.

Thumper, who rides his bike back and forth to work and gets his pay cheque garnished for bills for medication he has to have, took it all in his stride, saying: “[It was] just lying on the floor, dead as a doorknob just lying there. It’s not mine. I work for a living, I make money.”

Humanity can sometimes surpass itself in doing good.

 

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Come oil ye faithful....

Understandably, there has been festive cheer at the pumps in many places all over Europe as oil prices neared an 11-year low. On the local front, we have continued fuel price stability; elsewhere they just hope the “lows” continue, which is highly unlikely, of course.

World oil prices, however, have an obvious impact on the oil exploration industry. When the ‘lows’ occur, the brakes are applied; when the ‘highs’ return, the search goes full-throttle once again.

For some reason, I have always believed that were Malta ever to find the oil for which it has been searching since way back in the late 1950s, it would probably no longer be the valuable asset it has always been.

Many of us believe the oil is there. The Sicilians have it as do, to a much higher degree, the Libyans. Caught between them, we should one day be able to extract the black gold.

If it’s not too late....