On the true meaning of Christmas
Some notes on the man who to me represents the spirit of the season.
This week’s dip into the archives…
As the nights get darker, and the weather gets colder, and the festivities begin across the land, thoughts inevitably turn to a man whose life and death will always be associated with this time of year – a man whose purity of heart and good works alike contain, I think, the true spirit of the season.
George Michael was born Georgios Panayiotou in north London in 1963, the son of a Greek Cypriot restaurateur and his English dancer wife. He became obsessed with music after a bang on the head in the early 1970s, and in 1981, after a couple of false starts, began his career when he formed a duo with his school friend Andrew Ridgeley. Over the next five years, Wham had a string of hits, in the UK and beyond, made the sort of money that most of us can only dream about, then decided to break up amicably and remain friends (another thing, I fear, of which many can only dream).
After that, Michael had a successful solo career, as well as occasionally replacing Freddie Mercury in Queen or dueting with Elton John. When he was arrested for cottaging in 1998 and forced to go public with his sexuality, he released Outside, a song about the joys of public indecency, alongside a video featuring examples thereof while Michael himself danced in a toilet dressed as a cop. In his latter years, his Twitter feed was a great source of indiscreet celebrity gossip, generally signed, “Lots of love, The Singing Greek xxx”.
And then, on Christmas Day 2016, he died. He was 53. That’s no age.
But the timing of his death is not the only reason we – or at least, I; I haven’t actually polled this – associate George Michael with Christmas. One is, of course, that by a week into December you’re probably already sick of hearing Wham’s Last Christmas, for decades the UK’s highest selling single never to reach number one. (It lost the record when it finally did so last year, nearly 37 years after its original release.) It failed to top the charts when first released back in 1984 because it was kept off the top spot by Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas?, which you’re also sick of hearing by now, and on which the duo also performed. Because their own song was in direct competition with the charity single, Michael and Ridgely agreed to donate the royalties from Last Christmas to Ethiopian famine relief, too.
This was, as it turned out, a quite astonishingly generous thing to do.
But it was also entirely in character. And that’s the other reason I associate George Michael with this time of year: because Christmas 2016 brought an absolute torrent of stories about quite how generous he was.
He donated his royalties from his 1991 duet with Elton John, Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me, to the Terrence Higgins Trust, which supports people living with HIV; those from 1996’s Jesus To A Child went to Childline. In 2006, he gave a free concert for nurses, to say thanks for the care the profession had given his mother during the last week of her life; more money still went to Macmillan Cancer Support.
This is just scratching the surface. Every year Michael called Capital FM with a £100k donation to the Help A London Child campaign. He gave another £50k to send deprived kids to meet Santa in Lapland. The truly affecting stories, though, are the ones involving more personal forms of help. Working at a homeless shelter, and asking the team to keep it quiet. Phoning Deal or No Deal to give a contestant the money she’d failed to win to fund her IVF. Tipping a barmaid £5,000 to pay off her debts. This man was the ending of a Christmas movie made flesh.
Why are these stories so moving? Why, quite genuinely, do I read them again, to cheer myself up when feeling sad?
Many of us, I think, have been known to imagine how we’d act if we were rich. We think of the house we’d buy our parents, or the life changing help we’d offer friends. Perhaps we even imagine a more altruistic generosity, aimed at people we don’t know personally. What we’re telling ourselves when we do that is that we’d do things better than the people who are actually rich. Perhaps some of us would. But the evidence we have suggests that many of us would not.
George Michael actually did. He behaved as we like to imagine we would. The fact most of these stories did not come out in his lifetime is a reflection in part on the fact he genuinely wasn’t doing it to make himself look good: it’s just that he found himself in a position where he could help people, and so he did.
Forget Band Aid; forget Wham. That’s the real reason George Michael is the true meaning of Christmas.
The other true meaning of Christmas: stuff
Gonna keep the sales pitch bit short this time, as I am waaaay behind with my present buying. If you are, too, then why not buy someone the gift of CONTENT using this helpful link:
Alternatively - sign up for a year using the button below, and I’ll give you 10% off and also send you one of my books? (Either, you can choose.) Probably a bit late for Christmas, but hey, a bargain’s a bargain.
Here’s a picture of my dog Henry Scampi, looking full of the joys of the season (to be specific, overeating and then falling asleep):
Alternatively, as ever, if you want to read the newsletter but for whatever reason can’t justify the money right now, just hit reply and ask. I always say yes, and anyway, it’s Christmas.
God bless us, every one.