During the couple of decades that I have existed, I have noticed a strange occurrence, which I’m sure many of you will have noticed as well. It’s like time is shifting. Suddenly, it’s Halloween in September, Valentines in January, ‘back to school’ as soon as the schools have broken up and, most heart wrenchingly annoying of all, Christmas in October. It seems to me that the day that advertisers and retailers decide that it’s ‘Christmas time’ has been sliding slowly forwards year by year. Give it another ten years, or thereabouts, and maybe Slade will get their wish – it really will be Christmas every day.
Even though I’m generally quite a cynical person, I can’t deny it, Christmas is special. It doesn’t matter whether you believe in the religious connotations of the holiday, or not. The fact is that it’s a time to revel in our good fortune, however vast or disparaging it may be, with good food, good drink, good company and good spirit. It’s like it’s everybody’s birthday - everyone has something to celebrate. And, just like birthdays, one of the reasons why Christmas is special is preciously because it only comes once a year. It’s a matter of perception: if Slade got their wish, we wouldn’t even enjoy Christmas, because Christmas would be normality.
So what am I complaining about in this month’s blog? I’m complaining about the fact that consumerism is ruining my Christmas, and it’s doing so in more ways than one. Firstly, the build up to this beloved holiday is now so horrendously drawn out that, when the joyous event actually arrives, I'm akin to feeling less merry and more morbidly nauseous. Every time a child on some TV ad luridly shouts "IT'S CHRISTMAS!" it urges me closer and closer to projectile vomit my dozenth mince pie of the day, (which I started buying in August), directly at the Christmas tree, (which I thought I might as well leave up all year), producing an obscene metaphor for what this mongrel festival has become. A combination of desperate retailers, and an even more desperate chancery, has reduced modern day Christmas to nothing more than a prolonged marketing exercise and a much sought after boost to the economy. This is why Christmas now starts in October, and why we are encouraged for months on end to spend as much as we possibly can afford to.
This leads on to my second point – the obscene importance placed today on gift giving at Christmas. Let me say from the offset, anyone who looks forward to the festive season purely for the presents is, in my opinion, either a child, or an idiot. Sure, it’s great to receive a gift, especially if it’s something that you couldn’t usually afford, or wouldn’t usually buy for yourself. However, I assert that emphasising this aspect of the holiday as much as we do today is destroying it. This has a lot to do with the sad reality that most people in this country, and others, seem to have more in common with a sponge than an actual human being; wandering through life, their sole purpose seemingly being to soak up the slippery jizzum of retail and advertising, before wringing themselves out into their own, or their loved ones' moronically gaping mouths. Ultimately, this leads to people wanting more than these hard economic times can afford them.
Just imagine potentially how many families across the country could have their Christmases ruined by disappointment when they realise that the piece of jewellery, games console or mobile phone they so greatly desired isn’t waiting for them under the tree, simply because no one could afford to get it for them? Now imagine how desperate you would be to make sure this didn’t happen to your family… what would you do to prevent this? Get a loan perhaps? Yes, I suspect that at the very least you would feel pressured to. The problem is that, as we all know, excessive debt and credit is the reason why we’re in such an economic mess in the first place. This festive phenomenon is a microcosm of the consumer situation throughout the whole country, across the entire year, and in all sectors of commerce. As such, it serves as an example of just how little we’re actually doing to diffuse the ticking time bomb of private debt.
Meanwhile, austerity measures across Europe and the world are continuing to cause an uprising of civil disturbances, the latest (and most promising) incarnation being the Occupy Wall Street and other global Occupy movements. As dissatisfaction with the current system increases and becomes more highly disseminated to the public through both independent and mainstream media coverage of these occurrences, one can only hope that eventually people will no longer be interested in the phoney fixes and lugubrious legislation currently being spat out by our current government, and demand some changes that will actually make a difference. At this point, I expect that ‘the powers that be’ will have to listen, or else risk an exponential increase in both the violence and frequency of these anti-capitalist demonstrations, until they’re only really left with two choices - fight the power, or fight the people.
And so I am left shaking my fist at the Christmas lights that have already been put up in the West End of London, and living in tepid dread of the first Christmas hit that I will have the misfortune of hearing a month too early, hoping that I’ll be able to survive another year before denouncing my beloved festival altogether. I have no doubt that some people will read this and purely think me a Grinch who, for one reason or another, just doesn’t ‘get’ the Christmas spirit. To all you people I say, in a final flourish of easily dismissed but, nonetheless, accurate cliché – that’s what they want you to think.
Oh well, if you take anything at all away from this post, just remember this one thing…
CHRISTMAS STARTS IN DECEMBER
