“This Christmas, I hope everybody who feels different or excluded, by dumb rules or social mores, gets a lifetime of joy and belonging,” writes Kindness columnist ANTONIO DI DIO.

The village was made of bricks and stucco, the bones of the poor, mixed into a paste by an unholy collusion of religion and subjugation, and a conga line of 3000 years of invaders and oppressors. 

The fuel that ran the town was stories; thousands of tales tall and true.

My mum and dad were the most honest of folk, so all their stories were true to them, but often they had no idea they were describing fiction.

They told me about Orlando and the court of Charlemagne, Victor Emmanuel, Romeo and Juliet, Valjean and Javert, and Queen Lizabetta of England, Sofia Loren and Ben Hur and they were all equally real to them. 

It’s Christmas 1976 and there is a fuss and fun and talk. December 25th and the fancy new-fangled habit of exchanging gifts on Christmas has arrived from the Americans and northerners.

This is pretty cool, my cousins and I reckon, especially with that new-fangly Lego stuff. Our table has spread out to the balcony and there are streamers from somewhere. 

At some point an older cousin, maybe 13, talks about moving inland to be closer to the volcano, to breathe in its threats without fear and live “like a man”. 

This terrifies me, and I ask dad what it means to leave. Would it be shameful to stay when you had to leave? 

He says there are different kinds of shame, as the thinnest bloke I’ve ever seen walks down the old road between buildings of terraced apartments, the sea air sprinkling cold salt on to pasta and 17 kinds of tomato. 

“Is that bloke a shame, papa?”, I ask. Well, he is disgraced, son, yes. How, I ask? And how comes he’s walking like Maxwell Smart in secret and it’s Christmas Eve and he doesn’t look up and wave hello to everybody? 

This bloke, says dad, was a hero, “a regular person, he went off to the war like me, I never saw him away, but met again in ’46 when we got back. His disgrace? Well, apparently he was confused, and he did something different to other people – so he had to leave and never return.” 

It broke his family’s heart, this terrible thing he did. But, dad said, he is despite this awful sin, the same good man. Dad did not understand how he can be good and disgraced. What this rule was.

So why did this thin man return every Christmas? Because his family’s table was full of people, there were so many in the house that he could visit them safely. 

He sat at the table – they set a place for him – he rarely spoke apparently but to say “pass the salt” or some such, and then, after the meal ended and people started to chat, he wandered away. What? I asked, but that is ridiculous? Why doesn’t he stay? What’s wrong?

What’s wrong, replied dad, is the world: “The world has rules – the law of God and the law of the men in Rome in the government. But the thin man’s old mamma and papa will surely die if they do not see his face once a year and in this big full gathering tonight he can both be there and be hidden at the same time.” 

I live in Canberra today in a political town and in that village 50 years ago papa taught me the concept of plausible deniability. 

That poor, skinny neighbour, once a year at Christmas, could pretend he was a member of the world that had rejected him, just for being himself, and see the faces of those his heart yearned for every other day of the year. 

The human heart’s capacity for kindness extends to creatively rewriting the rules made by the cruel and the unjust, and in so doing will one day defeat every challenge that besets us. 

None of us kids got Lego those years, but we were surrounded by love and family and joy. And acceptance. We had no idea how lucky we were that the world was built for us, people our shape and size and colour and religion. 

This Christmas, I hope everybody who feels different or excluded, by dumb rules or social mores, gets a lifetime of joy and belonging. We can’t change dumb rules, but we can all make our attitudes kind and generous, today. That’s more powerful than any rule.

Antonio Di Dio is a local GP, medical leader and nerd. There is more of his Kindness on citynews.com.au