Competition: Bah! Humbug!

Lucy Vickery resents this week’s competition

In Competition No. 2677 you were invited to submit a poem in dispraise of Christmas.

The challenge awakened your inner Scrooge, eliciting a heartfelt chorus of disapproval of all things yule-related. Stoking the anti-Christmas spirit was the prospect of dry, tasteless turkey, grasping, ungrateful children, needle-shedding trees and the torture of office parties — among much else.

Commendations to W.J. Webster, Chris O’Carroll and Shirley Curran. The winners, printed below, get £25 apiece and the festive bonus fiver is Bill Greenwell’s. Happy Christmas!

Turkey gizzard, and a blizzard
Blasting through the bright arcade
(Cliff and Slade and Mud and Wizzard,
The usual claptrap, loudly played):
How I wish I had a hatchet —
Cut the lights and let the dark in,
Chop the tree and stifle Cratchit.
Christmas feeds my inner Larkin.

Season’s knees-ups, Christmas ceilidhs,
Greater greed than pigs in sties,
Pensioners on double Baileys,
Gorging gaily on mince pies:
Each December grows unpleasant
And, before its tide’s receded,
There is one thought ever-present:
Where is Herod when he’s needed?
Bill Greenwell

Cursed be the candles, the crackers, the cake.
Cursed be the tinsel-strewn tree.
Cursed be this festival, hollow and fake.
It means less than nothing to me.

A murrain on Santa, and Rudolph as well.
A pox on the carolling choir.
Bad cess to the cute fairy lights, and to hell
With the blazing Yule log on the fire.

Damn turkey and stuffing and cranberry sauce.
The devil with pud and mince pies.
What, wear paper headgear and eat like a horse?
I’d rather stick pins in my eyes.

Christmas to me is just obsolete, dead,
A clichéd parade of pure corn.
I’ll spend it like most days, alone in my shed
With my cider, my drugs and my porn.
G.M. Davis

They came upon the midnight — clear
As bottled beer I swear,
A band of angels drawing near
And hovering in the air;
‘Fear not!’ they sang, ‘There’s joy in store,
Rejoice, we come to bless,
And sing, Though Christmas comes once more,
Praise be! It comes once less.