There is much to be said for abolishing Christmas. It is a
festival of fake sincerity; the most dishonest season of the year. It is a time
for buying what can't be afforded and selling what would not sensibly be
wanted. It is a brief period of employment for obese drunks who are forced to
fit into tight red uniforms and pretend to be jolly. It is a time for families
to come together and realise how little they have in common but genes. It is
the moment for the Arch-Parasite of Buckingham Palace to descend from her
secluded palace and address the scum whose bent bodies support her and her
class. It is busy season for the casualty wards, where wage slaves off the
leash have bought escape through alcohol and mutilated themselves and others in
metal wreckages, while the lonely attempt suicide and are dragged in sighing to
be saved for another year. It is the period reserved for extra-special TV
stupidity: the régime of the faked smile, the contrived sentiment, public
condescension towards crippled children, and Noel Edmonds. It is the cold
season for the noses of the poor to be pressed up against windows which display
goods they may not buy. On the mass-produced greetings cards there is snow; in
the shop doorways they shiver and hope they will not freeze.
The religious believe that it has become too commercialised.
They want to rejoice in fantasies about a messiah born of a virgin. The traders
are generally indifferent to the origin of the seasonal madness; their god
announces his presence each time a cash till rings. Nobody knows quite what
it's all for. Vicars run jumble sales and declare that it doesn't matter if the
flock believes in Jesus. Merchants flog commodities with tacky images of babies
born in a manger; Dylan's "flesh-coloured Christs that glow in the dark."
All is confusion and falsified joy. The perfect festival for a system built on
sales and insincerity.
It probably has something to do with the end of the year and
a faint hope that the new one will be better. Perhaps Christmas is the illusory
prelude to a new dawn: the lazy man's route to revolution. After Christmas come
the resolutions of the New Year: ritualised hopes by the self-deluded who dream
of self-control.
Worse even than Christmas are those New Year parties where
strangers hug each other and pretend that the haze of booze and fabrication of
community will last forever. The unkissed make a grab for whatever they can
get, forcing some victim into physical proximity in the name of festivity. The
next morning's stench of stale whisky is already in the air; the blushes of
office co-workers who will have to share a desk after an unwanted snog are
being planned; the delirium of the depressed makes its dreary way as the
calendar changes and Ding Dong . . . it's 1998 and nothing's changed.
So, away with all this bogus goodwill and let us say what we
mean. Tell the boss to stick his Christmas dinner where the sun don't shine,
because you'd rather have the money. Tell the clerical men in dresses to bugger
off and put their own house in order before they have the audacity to preach to
us about how to live. Tell the charity merchants to seek their own crumbs,
because we want the cake which we baked and nothing less. Tell Santa to get a
life and stop trying to seduce innocent children with the lure of commodities.
And tell those dull, offensive, dreary carol singers that if they so much as
come within a foot of your door with their chants about little Jesus meek and
mild they'll be having their lukewarm stuffing in an overcrowded corridor down
at the local hospital.
Despite our best efforts, Capitalism's Merry Men will do
their worst. Once again the TV News will carry pictures of the homeless being
given a charitable mince pie by decent people who will be forced after
Christmas to throw them back on to the cold, winter streets. Once again the
Vatican Godfather will ascend his balcony and rub salt into the wounds of
millions who will be told that their misery is god's will. Once again those who
refuse to celebrate religious and commercial folly will be called kill-joys.
Even though all that socialists want to see is a society decent and
co-operative and sociable enough for there to be no need to put aside one week
or one day for happiness to prevail.
Steve Coleman
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