Public square with Safia Nolin | Extraordinary commitments

Occasionally, Dialogue offers a space to a personality to allow them to share their way of seeing the world. A few days before Christmas, Safia Nolin talks to us about her childhood memories, her worries… and the small gestures that save us.

This year, I think Christmas tastes strange. I’m not talking about mint chocolate, which I find frankly disgusting, but disturbingly bitter. The one that makes you wonder if you should call the poison control center.

I have always been an “ultrafan” of the celebrations surrounding the birth of Christ. I think it comes from a place where I always wanted normalcy and stability. Even though the world was spinning too quickly with lack of money and moving, my parents managed to make us feel like we were like the others. My dad is Muslim, so there may have been no baby Jesus in our nativity scene (literally), but he put on a whole show involving boots full of snow and cookies to make us believe that old Santa Claus was coming too. see.

Over time and in different cities, Christmas became an opportunity to bring my chosen family together. I chose my sister, of course, and her boyfriend. I choose my closest friends. Less close ones too. I also choose people who don’t have party Christmas planned. Over the years, I have collected a collection of wonderful, atypical New Year’s Eves. Sometimes at home, sometimes at the Korean barbecue, December 24th is rarely boring and I always end up telling myself that well, it’s not like in the movies, but that in the end, it’s probably better.

These days, I’m having a hard time seeing Christmas this way. I have reached what I think is the bottom of my naive hope pan. I’ve been riding an “E” tank for a long time now. I feel that everyone’s rope is getting tighter and tighter and less and less provided in terms of little threads.

Before, I had the impression that it was in the darkest moments that we found the light (a quote that can be attributed to Dumbledore or Leonard Cohen, your choice), but it seems that since the beginning of November, When the holiday magic usually rears its ugly head, I feel like it’s raining soot on us.

One morning, on TikTok, I saw a montage of nostalgic photos of what Christmas was like in the 1990s, when I was little. To tell you that I haven’t shed a tear would be to lie. There was nothing fundamentally different, other than the disgusting silver icicles that we hung on our trees (and that our cats tried to eat), but it seemed like another world, another life.

In 1998, Christmas was already a holiday of overconsumption. In 1998, there were conflicts in the world. In 1998, there were injustices and systems of oppression. The big difference was my childhood outlook.

I didn’t know that this was the world we lived in. I know it now, and definitely, I can no longer act as if nothing had happened.

The false magic of Christmas

The day before yesterday, I was at the dog park, and I felt really dizzy when I told myself that if we stopped producing toys right now, we would surely have them for 200 years. I thought about the ocean which is filled with plastic, about the dead children in Gaza, about the fact that soon we will have to prepare to lose our rights, especially those we thought we had acquired.

It started to spinner in my head, and it never stops, and it seems that the false magic of Christmas makes it even more dizzying. It’s the same loop. Things need to change. I’m going to change things. I’m doing things to change that. I see that my efforts will not change the world. I want to give up.

Last year, for Christmas, Valérie, my sister’s-boyfriend’s-father’s-blonde (she looks like a jokebut it is not one) offered me Ordinary commitments by Mélikah Abdelmoumen. This book cured me of a form of cynicism in the face of our small daily militant gestures, which may seem futile, even useless, but which are oh so important, because otherwise, there is nothing.

This is where the real hope lies. This is also where the true beauty of humans lies, those that I often find really ugly. We can decide to change things, alone or together.

My friend Melyssa is a world-changer. One evening, two weeks ago, it was -10, we were walking through Masson and, at the window of a bakery, there was Denis drinking hot chocolate.

Denis is my neighbor. He doesn’t have a house, he sleeps outside, but he’s my neighbor. I’ve seen him around a couple of times now, and I’ve been trying to get to know him. He’s shy, he doesn’t talk much, but he has a huge heart. Once he told me that he lacked nothing except the essentials.

That evening, on Masson, me and Mel, we went into the bakery to talk to him a little. He seemed good, but above all, he was quick to tell us that that morning, a lady had written him a little Christmas card in which she had slipped some money. As he told us the story, he started to cry. My heart exploded, time stopped, and I couldn’t do anything but have water in my eyes.

Denis told us that it had been five years since he received a Christmas card. And then, there was another gentleman who gave him $50, telling him that he did that once a year, and that he was the one who would receive it this year. Denis cried again.

I don’t know if people realize the impact each action has. The world we live in is complicated, difficult and downright terrifying. We cannot accept that people live outside, we cannot accept this rate of consumption, we cannot accept genocides. Every gesture counts, even the smallest.

I wish us more of that in our Christmases.

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