SHOPPING centre Christmas standards are mostly about reindeer, mistletoe and jingling bells, but there is one exception.
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Happy Xmas (War Is Over), sung by John Lennon, Yoko Ono and children from the Harlem Community Choir, always stops me in my tracks.
It celebrates Christmas and good cheer, but it also asks us to think about the state of the world and what we can do to make it a better place.
As the year comes to a close, war is definitely not over, and we have broken another climate record.
By June, we had beaten the record for global surface air temperatures set in 2016; by November, scientists had declared 2023 the hottest year in recorded history.
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Meanwhile, greenhouse gas emissions kept rising, despite the increasingly urgent pleas from United Nations secretary general Antonio Guterres.
In July, he declared that "the era of global warming has ended" and "the era of global boiling has arrived".
He quashed any idea that climate change was a problem for the future.
"Climate change is here. It is terrifying. And it is just the beginning," he said, with "children swept away by monsoon rains, families running from the flames (and) workers collapsing in scorching heat."
For many years I believed the myth that crabs and lobsters would not feel the pain if they were boiled slowly, starting with cold water.
They'd go to sleep in the warm water and be dead before it began to bubble.
Then I saw, with my own eyes, a giant mud crab pulling itself out of the pot as soon as it started to get hot.
Later, I Googled it, and learned that the myth of an easy death was just there to make us feel better about our Christmas lunch.
Now I'm beginning to wonder if the species that sent men to the moon is actually dumber than your average mud crab.
We're somehow simultaneously boiling and not really noticing it. When forced to face it, we tend to produce hot air rather than decisive action.
But there is a glimmer of hope. This year, the world's leaders at the December climate talks in Dubai agreed, for the first time since these talks began in the mid-1990s, to explicitly name the burning of fossil fuels as the main culprit in the warming of the Earth.
The United Nations declared the agreement was "the beginning of the end" of the fossil fuel era.
We're still in hot water, but there's a chance we'll manage to climb out of the pot before it's too late.
