Husiness as usual
It's never Christmas already?
Alan Brien
Odd isn't it, that it is usually atheists who Protest most strongly against Christmas as the secularisation of a religious festival, and socialists who are most shocked at Christmas as the continuation of capitalism by other nleans? Which is as near to an original opening can get for what is, in twenty-five years of journalism, probably the eighteenth or nineteenth Christmas article I have written on the self-denying principle of if I don't do it soirteone else will have to. "Christmas comes but once a year" is 113erhaPs a safer, more reassuring, lead in, ,4cking only the merit of being accurate. `-hristmas is coming, all year long. Even as you paste up your Sellotaped-smile, forcing your "IPS to frame for the umpteenth time the phrase inst what I . wanted'', standing amid a wilderness of pine needles, greetings paper, nut Shells, burst balloons, champagne-type corks, nalf-broken toys and mini-cigar butts, you are ,rnnscious of Next Christmas and the Ghosts of tuletides Yet To Come in all their Dickensian at and clobber, lurking round the corner, ,44iting to pound your holly-encrusted knocker 'lid lurch in, breath incandescent with seasonal sPirit, Christmas looms over the next twelve Inkenths, as over the last, like the Budget, like an bau°riginal calamity, like a pillar of smoke from r,.urning goose-fat by day and a pillar of fire '°11-1 flaring chocolate wrappings by night, like ar, cloud on the horizon the size of a man's uverdraft, like a ticking parcel on the door mat th,Lerhed OHMS, like a ring on the bell at three in "Le morning. e Christmas is the buffer into which our annual tipress train must inevitably crash, covering rie distance faster and faster in each decade. s`nristmas is ten birthdays, a hundred memorial rnervioes, a thousand wedding anniversaries, a e."111100 old boys' reunions, a trillion retirement he,retnanies where you give away all the golden egndshakes and pick up all the bills, and stay bn to do the washing-up. It is the hangover IF, Ore the party, the wake before the funeral, me storm before the lull, when the condemned On eats a hearty dinner before he blindfolds ''Ittlself with three ties he'll never wear again smokes a last cheroot as the crackers fire. aerrible as an army with parcels, unnerving as pn invitation to sup with the Borgias, inescaC4ble as a summons to appear before Tax h:rinnissioners, interminable as a wait n "Veen trains at Bletchley, predictable as the rilleen's Speech, yet another milestone rking the route to that great present-openh in the sky, when you will be given a f-bottle of brimstone (non-vintage), a comic s,?1.t (solid iron and red hot) and a gaudy hair '1_rI. all clearly marked "Acceptable Gift". :then middle age, in the eye of the a31-ireissstnit°ans, writing a piece to appear on Eve, is not the ideal time to „_Preciate the season of good business and csauodwill. Fortunate are the children for they 4011tn°t remember those Yule-time days of so-yore, as we can. Christmas as the time theen • . The time when bumpkins deserting hietc°LintrY to see the lights in Town meet roPolitans fleeing the Town to kindle their
log-fires in the country, usually head-on in fog along the motorway. When god-fathers struggle to remember the ages of their god-children, and best-friends to recall the names of their best-friends' wives, or their ex-wives' new best-friends. When mistresses are neglected and vicars popular and fat men put off going on a diet for yet another week and dreary men crack jokes and sexless men fancy their wives and miserly men give to charity and rude kids say "thank-you" and memorise the first two lines of one carol and agnostics go to Midnight Mass just for the music. And those with money give expensive and useless presents while those without give cheap and useless presents. And special TV programmes link the world to allow people in Northern England who are hard of hearing to converse with relatives in Southern Australia who have nothing to say meanwhile watched by millions in between who have nothing better to do. When the sick feel sicker and the old older and the poor poorer and the lonely lonelier and the smug smugger. When those who can't sing, sing, and those who can't drink, get drunk, and the only child gets sick for no reason, the alcoholic gets sick because of something he ate. When taxis smell of perfume, oranges, cigars, egg nog, wet leather, new shirts, old armpits and whatever was eaten for breakfast by that pretty secretary with a weak stomach who was being treated all lunchtime to gin and Baby Cham by that ugly executive, and anyway are impossible to hail. When the country which invented the railway stops running trains. And the country which pioneered the penny post gives up delivering letters, even at Is. 7d. each. And the country which has the largest newspaper readership per head in the world provides no papers for Christmas Day or Boxing Day. When the BBC and ITV gain their highest viewing figures of the year, each topping the other according to its own patent method of counting pairs of eyes, for old films which, if their audience has not seen them before, it can only be because nobody was in the audience when they were shown in cinemas. When there are always more people on your side of the counter in shops and less on the other side, and those on the other side are always temps hired only for the week and could not tell you where anything is or what it cost even if they did speak English. When the woman at the theatre box-office is always too busy answering the telephone to deal with you when you turn up in person with cash in hand — and always dealing with cash customers personally standing in line, and so too busy to answer the telephone, when you ring.
Christmas is a humbug — probably a humbug filled with pineapple liqueur, rolled in marzipan, coated with icing, dipped in gold leaf, and embedded in a plum pudding, itself wedged inside a turkey, like a fragment of lethal grapeshot fired by a blunderbuss from a speeding stagecoach. Every year it cracks another tooth, the prosperous, declining West's tactful gesture, in the best of taste, towards a near-starving rest of the world, emerging the hard way, most of which, anyway, celebrates its national festivals, on other days, in other fashions, to other deities, or none. The gingerbread is thick with guilt, and even here there are many households where more goodies will be seen on telly commercials than will ever arrive through the front door. And yet. . . and yet ... and yet.
still, against all my logic and all my rhetoric, despite my finer feelings, feel the old excite
ment rising within me at the approach of the Optimum Sales( Potential Peak of Father Christmas Ltd and the Good King Weencelas Group of Companies. 1 still go to bed later on its Eve and rise earlier on its Day than any greedy, insomniac child, lam quickest on the draw with a cracker, last to doff the silly paper hat, the most generous hand with the flaming brandy, the most obsessive hoarder up of food and drink as if the great siege began on midnight of December 24. I rattle the packages more eagerly, make wilder guesses at the contents,
display more genuine gratitude, and treasure my toys longer, than a battalion of Smikes.
Christmas is not so much a religious festival commercialised as a commercial routine sanctified. It is business as usual, only more so, and so long as we are sales-oriented, profit-directed, consumer society any excuse — Mother's Day or St Valentine's, Whitsun or Easter — will serve. The time for the emptor to enter his caveat is on the other 364 days. After all, as I always say I always say, Christmas comes but once a year.
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