Yulery-Foolery
WHEN we say, as we quite often do and have done since the dawn of time, that something is not what it used to be, we generally mean that it has shrunk or dwindled. This is not the burden of my complaint against Christmas. In my lifetime Christmas has got bigger, but not better; and at the risk of being thought a curmudgeon I am going to point out some of the flaws (as they seem to me) in contemporary methods of celebrating this festival.
In the first place, Christmas goes on much too long. Yule logs start crackling on the covers of the Christmas numbers in November. Decorations in the shops and streets get nearer every year to clashing with the autumnal tints. I know that there are sound reasons for this, but they are basically com- mercial reasons, and to me there is something synthetic and unattractive in this over-long overture of yulery-foolery. One of the points about a great occasion is that it is an occasion, not an indeterminate tract of time.
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Broadcasting is a powerful agent in making Christmas seem to go on and on and on. The BBC is relentlessly seasonable. Its transmitters, like artillery laying down a creeping barrage which will help the poor clueless infantry on to some distant and scarcely attainable objective, start blazing away long before H-hour. Recipes for brandy butter, jokes about turkeys, exhortations to post early, carols, sleigh-bells, excerpts from pantomimes in rehearsal, and a brace of pie-eyed angels on the outside of the Radio Times of December 14—for days ahead of Christmas itself you can hardly twiddle a knob without getting an earful of artificial snow.
On December 17, for instance, the Home Service offered us a talk on 'Christmas in a Four-masted Barque.' On the 18th, warming to its work, it broadcast talks on 'Christmas in the Bush' and 'Preparing for Christmas'; on the 19th we got, or could have got, 'Going Home for Christmas' and 'Christmas in Benares.' On the same day only the fact that it was recorded last September kept all reference to mince- pies out of the Third Programme's 'Kitchen Problems in Ancient Greece.' On the Light Programme regular features like Women's Hour,' Housewives' Choice' and 'Family Favourites' were hock-deep in holly. * * *
None of this does anybody any harm, but it all helps to make us sick of the sound of Christmas before Christmas Day arrives. I think this is a pity. Anticipation ought to be a private pleasure. 1 can still remember how boring and intrusive I used, as a small boy, to think grown-ups who asked me if I was looking forward to Christmas, or whether 1 expected that Santa Claus would bring anything for me. It was the mysterious and inviolable parcels accumulating in a forbidden room, the suddenly broken-off conversations of the grown-ups, the general atmosphere of a conspiracy, that made the days leading up to Christmas so exciting. Christmas Day ought to he a climax, a day that goes off like a firework after long and delicious expectation. I am sure it is still a climax for the modern child, but I cannot believe that its status as such is strengthened by all its ingredients being plugged on TV and the wireless for a week or more beforehand.
As I write these anti-seasonable words Christmas is still five days away, yet already well over a hundred Christmas cards have arrived for the members of my household. We sometimes say of a foreign nation that its citizens, though intolerable in the mass, arc really quite nice individually. That is how I feel about Christmas cards. 1 am truly grateful to the people who have sent us these strangely assorted missives —the photograph of their baby or their battleship, the appalling scene of carnage from which their regiment extri- cated itself in 1777, the reproduction of an old master, the Blankshire in full cry, the robins, angels, turkeys, yule-logs, coaches-and-six, the woodcocks and the greylag geese, the poodles on the lawn of Government House. occasionally even an avant-garde version of the ox and the ass and the Object of the Exercise.
But something tells me that it is in the cause of a universally unpopular routine, rather than of goodwill, that the postman has borne through the beechwoods to my house these incre- ments to his normal burden. I believe that a small fortune could be quickly made by anyone who designed a series of agreeable cards, each of which incorporated a deed of covenant binding adult members of the recipient's family not to exchange Christmas cards with the sender for a period of (say) ten years.
These cards, since they could obviously be sent only to close friends, would be regarded as tokens of true esteem and would be highly prized; and although my project, if success- ful, would adversely affect the interests of the trade, it could hardly fail to benefit those of the community as a whole. Call me a killjoy if you like, but I really cannot see what useful purpose is served by the diversion of effort involved in manu- facturing, marketing, addressing, dispatching, delivering and finding temporary lodgement on the mantelpiece for the blizzard of perfunctory and expensive greetings which modern yulery-foolery has imposed on us.
* * * Finally there is the question of parcels. The ultimate pur- pose of a parcel is to be opened; and although I am sure that many man-hours and scarcely calculable quantities of jute (or whatever string is made of) are saved by doing up parcels with adhesive tape, this ultimate purpose is thereby defeated. A child can worry a modern parcel like a puppy; but it cannot, unaided, get at the contents. I think it is time we stopped wallowing in Christmas and made an effort to preserve its essentials. String is the least of them.
STRIX
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