Topical Post

You can't have missed the recent flurry of controversy over Christmas decorations being renamed "Holiday Trees" by some organisations - and the occasional volte-face following customer complaints.

I even read some journo the other day who said something along the lines of, "It's understandable if Christians get annoyed about this kind of thing. After all, we did steal their festival."

Which just puzzled me, to be honest. Because I find it hard to believe that there's anyone who really thinks that we secularists have done anything other than to continue to celebrate the festival in more or less the same way it has been celebrated since the first time someone accidentally ate fermented fruit.

The word is a problem, because Christ-mass does have connotations, obviously. But then so does Holy-day! If anything, renaming a Christmas tree a Holiday tree just reveals the depths of someone's stupidity.

I've mentioned below, vis-a-vis the stream of winter road incidents (and before on Lisa's blog) that the milestone of the shortest day, Dec 21st, when the days really do start getting longer, and we've broken the back of the Dark Half of the year, really is something worth celebrating. If Christmas hadn't already been invented, I would start it now! Personally, I don't care what you call it. The word Christmas is entirely divorced from its religious context - just as the word holiday clearly is for most people. It's as religious as me shouting, "Jesus Christ!" when someone infuriates me.

Anyone who gets up early feels the full force of the Dark Half of the year from the end of October to the end of February. When we were a rural folk, we all felt it, which is why we had a fucking big blow-out at the end of December and another fucking big blow out in the Spring. It's why we light fires at the end of October or beginning of November. Darkness, rain, ice, fog, and wet snow: all these things are shit. For farmers, postal workers, shift workers, for crazy fools who live too far from where they work, the dark days are dark indeed.

If you don't leave the office at lunchtime, if you just sit at your desk all day, you see no daylight. Arrive at work in the dark, leave work in the dark. No wonder people get depressed, no wonder they invented a celebration to cover the period when things are at their darkest, just before they get better. It's our festival, the People's Festival, if you will. It doesn't belong to Christians, or the Coca Cola company, or religionists of any ilk. We celebrate because it's fucking dark and we fucking hate it, and we want it to be over.

Cheers.