CHREXIT - THE END OF CHRISTMAS (AT LAST)

Someone asked me recently if Brexit was a “brand”. Too right I said. Wouldn’t you buy “Brexit Brain Drain Unblocker”or “Brexit Bleach” - formidable, strong killers of all liberal germs (germs have feelings too as that horrible commercial for Domestos suggests)? “Exit” itself became a verb when HR decided the idea of ‘exiting’ staff rather than firing them seemed less messy because ‘exiting’ is like keyhole-dismissal as opposed to open-heart dismissal.

But while we’re at it let’s ‘exit’ Christmas…. let’s stop the festival that creates more bankrupts than anything else.  Here are the arguments for stopping the event. It celebrates the birth of Christ - yet only 50% of the UK claims to be Christian, a quarter of those don’t believe in the resurrection and only 800,000 go to church on the average Sunday. Christmas now starts in October and runs through to the New Year punctuated by Halloween, Thanksgiving and Black Friday. It’s a long, it’s expensive and to many people it’s a meaningless event - it’s like celebrating your birthday on the wrong day (like Lewis Carroll’s brilliant idea of ‘un-birthdays’.)

Christmas is a frenzy of iffy commercials, inebriation, office parties, family-fret-togethers and tawdry lighting. I recently watched one of the many Christmas films (I wasn’t feeling very well at the time) called “Santa Who?” Imagine eating a large box of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk in one sitting…there’s only so much feel-good anyone can take.  More people get stressed, ill or suicidal over the long bleak Christmas holiday to be greeted in January by the tax man and as like as not another reorganisation at work. Let’s “cancel Christmas” as Alan Rickman immortally spat in ‘Robin Hood Prince of Thieves’.

But, actually, let’s not do that. Let’s instead kill the Grinch in us.

Let’s embrace the corny. The smell of tangerines, Armagnac, mince pies, fir trees; the taste of turkey (whoever said it’s tasteless is eating the wrong kind of bird), stuffing, Brussel sprouts, parsnips, chocolate ginger, brandy cream; the hygge feel of that log fire; the sound of some of the best music ever composed - just listen to the Sussex Carol, Noel Nouvelet, Bethlehem Down and the sight of Christmas decorations, a general anticipation of happiness and 7.5 million or more going to church around Christmas. Very few things bring us together like this.

Read the American Nathaniel Hawthorne, the real inventor of Christmas as we know it. His book “The Old Christmas” romanticises the idea of “peer and peasant in harmony”, of log fires, food, fun and games. The wintry bleakness, he argues, induces us to look within to find our true, kind social selves.
In a world of fake news, fake politicians and fake emotions we’re being conditioned to stop believing in anything.

And that’s a pity.

It’s time to believe again, in goodness, in kindness and in the story of generosity of spirit - the story of Santa Claus. Because Christmas is the best party ever concocted.

WHY I STILL BELIEVE IN SANTA CLAUS

“Bah! Humbug! Don’t be daft…you can’t.” But I do… I completely believe in the idea of Santa Claus…of sleigh bells…of “Ho! Ho! Ho’s!” and of Rudolf. Like all great, timeless stories it has evolved and gathered a patina of stuff like the elves, North Pole, chimneys and that red Santa costume. I really believe in the spirit of Christmas that this projects.

And that’s why I abhor the idea of telling children at a certain age that it isn’t true, that the whole idea is a piece of childish garbage. A friend told me that when his mother told him aged 10 “the truth” he told her insouciantly “yeah I knew that.” But he didn’t and just went away sobbing because an idea had been broken and a trust destroyed.

Imagine the guffaws of laughter provoked by the Rubens painting of St. Francis at Christ’s crucifixion. …spoiler alert …Francis wasn’t born for another 1200 years so the whole thing is a lie. Ho. Ho. Ho.

In a year which heralded the arrival of post-truth my support for the idea not the literal truth being what matters may seem dangerously avant-garde.  But Christmas like love is not something we can just reduce to facts.

Fact or fiction? Whenever we read a totally engaging story we lose ourselves in the truth of that story. A Christmas Carol, Pickwick Papers are both in the bubble in which we read them, totally credible. The skilful storyteller can induce what Samuel Taylor Coleridge 200 years ago called a “suspension of disbelief”.
In the car recently the Archers came on the radio and our grandsons listened…there was a long silence. When it finished I heard that carefully phrased question: “Grandpa are those real people and why do they talk like that?”  The Archers and those funny “old people” - step up Joe Grundy - have become a new truth which they and other soap opera stars are for many people. Just  as the Shire has its own reality in Lord of the Rings.

Do you believe in miracles? Do you believe the incredible can happen? You’d better after 2016. But miracles need a little help. Like great magic the more we’re predisposed to accept the implausible the more wonderful the trick becomes.

Sadly as we grow up and become more rational and hardened against play we lose a little of our humanity. We become cynical about the stories that can make the world so beautiful a place.

I believe in goodness, in human beings, in generosity of spirit and in Christmas not as a factual thing but as a completely brilliant idea and story. A story that is timeless and which bonds us together. And what better way to start a story could there be than this?

“In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan, earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone; snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow, in the bleak midwinter, long ago.”