The Christmas holidays are well-known all over the world for the enforced closeness people are pushed into, with the accent being on family reunions and the like. Many welcome these occasions but some do not, for a variety of reasons. It is with a sigh of gratitude that they welcome the resumption of work after the Christmas shutdown and schools reopening some days later.

But in Malta, given its small size, this huddle is replicated many times over on a national scale.

We refer here to the innumerable times where the country has to sit and listen to the top people of Malta making one appearance after the other, whether it is to convey their Christmas greetings as they did last Saturday, to appearing at L-Istrina as they did on Thursday, to appearing on Xarabank as they did last night. We can never have enough of them, it seems, so just as in Christmas eating we have one eating binge after another, so too we binge on the appearance of these personalities.

It is right and proper for these people to appear joking and laughing with each other, considering many of them spend the rest of the year badmouthing and attacking each other.

We will now have the New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day to get through, not forgetting the President’s Concert and sundry other appearances.

Many of us pity them: on a rainy night, cold and blustery, when all we want is to sit comfortably at home in warmth and in congenial surroundings, they have to dress up and to be taken to such places where every little gesture they make is critically assessed.

One would have thought that, once out of office, they welcome returning back to private life with a pleasure: only, it does not seem many of them do, for they re-appear as ‘emeritus’ this and ‘emeritus’ that. They accept every invitation they get and go to some lengths to be present. It would seem they somehow feel that the country, without them, will not be able to carry on.

We must be the only people on earth to have this craving: other peoples limit the appearance of their highest personalities as much as they can. The Queen of England, for instance, makes the annual Christmas message and that’s that: she does go to church on Christmas Day but as a private person. Her grandsons may play against each other in a rowdy game of football but that’s that. In Italy, President Napolitano makes his usual Christmas message and then carries on with his duties. As to the main political persons appearing as ours do in a game show and in a collection of money, that is simply unthinkable: can you imagine Berlusconi sitting next to Beppe Grillo?

To go back to Thursday’s L-Istrina, it’s not as if we do not have enough people who can and do entertain us with what they get up to. So why do we have to get a huge dollop of the top people speaking down and preaching at us?

This is not a 2013 phenomenon. In 1999, with the Millennium in its last seconds, the then Head of State decided to harangue the crowd and we almost missed entering the new Millennium were it not that a prankster kept ringing the Head of State’s mobile and possibly made him cut short sharing his lofty views on Malta and the world.

This hogging of the limelight by the country’s top persons is something that will go on and on and grow and grow, from one event to more unless someone with more sense and grasp of reality slows the process down and reverses it to the acceptable levels it used to be just some years ago.

However, there does not seem to be any sign of this ‘someone’.