1. Santa – the Man
Loose fitting but matted nylon beard, fake optical twinkle, cheap red suit. The distinct whiff of Jack Daniels and ammonia when you close. If he’s such a big shot, why is he drawing unemployment benefit for eleven months of the year? Something scary and offkey about him. And there are good reasons why the children are no longer allowed to sit in his lap for a cuddle.
2. Santa – the Concept
Why would anyone half way normal want to live at the North Pole on a bunch of rapidly melting ice floes? Or stay up all night delivering presents to children of doubtful deservingness. There is a point where altruism becomes sick. Or else a sinister cover up for an international scam. Perhaps something to do with the Russians. A man of no plausible address and with no apparent source for his obvious wealth comes down your chimney after midnight. Are we not right to be alarmed and averse?
3. Santa’s Little Helpers.
Again, what is really going on here? Why do these supposed elves submit to sweatshop conditions in what must be one of the gloomiest climates in the world – unless they’re getting something out of it at our expense. Underclass masochism one day, bloody rebellion the next. The rat-tat-tat of tiny hammers may be just the beginning.
4. Oh Tannenbaum!
Suppose it topples over under its weight of bomb shaped baubles? Suppose it harbours wood-borers which will migrate to the rafters? There is something ghastly about a tree – its look of many limbed paralysis, its shaggy and conscienceless aplomb – encountered in the open, let alone in the living room. At night you can hear it rustling and slurping water out of its bucket.
5. Reindeer
Nasty sharp hooves that cut through roof tiles like Stanley knives. Unstable flight patterns, totally undocumented entrance to our country, which we have taken back. Fur laden with disease bearing ticks.
6. Electrocution and its antithesis
The frayed cable on those Christmas light you bought in Gammidges in 1968 will this year see you fused to the National Grid in perpetuity, a charred husk. There should be a quantity theory of electricity: we need enough to make things work, not enough to kill you. Because on Christmas Day, when the kids are holding aloft their awful newly acquired gizmos and gadgets – there will be no batteries. And you will never find the right batteries. Ever.
7. The Carols
Chiming out from the malls. But who was King Wenceslas and when on earth is the feast of Stephen? And who is Stephen? And a stocking filler prize for the first imbecilic Anglican vicar of the year who announces to his congregation and later the press that he is banning Oh Little Town of Bethlehem. How still we see thee lie? It’s not lying still, is it? Not when its under the jackboot of Zionist oppression.
8. The TV Christmas Specials
Once it was Bring Me Sunshine followed by fifteen minutes of the Queen. Now it’s a four week bacchanalia of brutality and carnality on Eastenders and the usual squamous-celled liberal propaganda. Charles Dickens reimagined by John McDonnell in which Scrooge is hanged from a lamppost and the Cratchits emigrate to the undoubted utopia of Venezuela.
9. Fear of Not Giving Enough
Crushed, broken and sweating on the escalator in Selfridges as you try, with flaccid desperation, to outbuy what your friends have bought for you. With impoverishment looming at every step. Count out those coins. Max your card. Heaven forfend you buy cheaper tat than them.
10. Fear of Not Receiving Enough
Two pairs of socks. Some navy blue underpants from Primark. And a book about the economy by Will Hutton. Is this really how they see you?
11. Fear of Returns
Because nothing works and nothing fits. And so you descend into mercantilism’s boiler room to haggle and plead with the implacable staff – who knew the moment you arrived that you did not have a receipt.
12. The Dark
Dark dark dark, we all go into the dark. And how green about the gills we look, scrabbling along in drab winter wraps, the light expiring on the dot at three thirty. Slouching towards Jerusalem past department store windows full of polystyrene snow, mockups of a factitious 1890, the guileless mannequins posed with frozen allure in bright red knickers with a green reindeer on the front. Is this Hell? Or just an upturn in consumer confidence?
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