Christmas time, mistletoe and wine - pass the sick bucket

MG writes:

It is customary at this time of the year, in fashionable circles, to be rudely cynical about Christmas. How the 'festival' has become an over-commercialised exercise whose sole aim is merely to make money for greedy capitalists hell bent on extracting the last ounce of flesh from increasingly impoverished inhabitants of the Western World. Steeped in nostalgia, the cynics look back to a time when the real meaning of Christmas was still remembered and the festive season was not dominated by a merciless grab for (your) cash.

Unfortunately for the cynics, they are looking through the rose-tinted spectacles of a long lost childhood. Christmas, for anyone who could afford it, has been commercialised since at least Victorian times, way beyond a living individual's power to remember; the only thing that has changed over the past century or so is that more people are able to afford it.

Who invented Christmas cards? That great bonus for jobbing (read not very good) artists, practised in the art of the snow scene and the robin,  even more mediocre verse writers and finally the Post Office, who get a return on their investment for machinery to deliver post more effectively throughout the year in one fell, winter-time coup. You guessed it, the Victorians! 

Who invented the custom of inserting a dead tree into every living room in the land. A tree, cut down in its prime, and too large for your living-room, whose sole purpose, at great expense, is to shed pine needles over your shag-pile, cream carpet, like ejaculate on satin sheets. A tree festooned with imitation candles, imitation glass baubles, foul-tasting chocolate imitation money and imitation silver and gold 'snow' (tinsel). The Victorians.

Whence comes the ubiquitous turkey instead of the goose of earlier times? The Victorians, keen to assimilate the traditional Thanksgiving dish of its erstwhile colony.  The turkey is not native to these shores. It is said that the turkey population of the UK two weeks before Christmas is 10,000,000. By 26 December it is zero or as close to zero as to make no difference;. Bernard Matthews built an empire of turkey farms upon a single day, a day when the collective conscienceness of a nation takes a 'sickie' day off!

When did 'Sinta Klaus', St Nicholas, Santa Claus, gain the popularity that it, he, enjoys today? Why are children encouraged to believe in a mythical figure, who not only manages to appear in a grotto in every department store in the weeks preceding 25 December but also manages to visit every household on the night of Christmas Eve to deliver presents. You guessed it; blame the Victorians! And who came up with the idea of the chimney, who gave names to the reindeer? (Comet and Cupid, Dancer and Prancer, Dasher and Vixen, Donner and Blitzen, if you are at all interested). Yes, the usual suspects. (Rudolph was added later to the roll-call of reindeer by the Americans; you need a central character if you want to make a story.)

I have been sending home-made Christmas cards for many years except that they do not say 'Merry Christmas'; they say 'Happy Saturnalia'. For that it is what Christmas has become. A time for the exchange of gifts, a time of celebration of a God (Mithras or Mammon, it matters not; both are false), a time of over-indulgence, a time of celebration that winter has turned the corner and will soon become spring. If early Christians hi-jacked the 'Feast of Mithras' for a feast in celebration of Jesus' birth, it is no less true that the Romans hi-jacked the festival of the 'Winter Solstice' for Saturnalia and the Feast of Mithras'.

If you have a penchant to believe in the the hype of cynics, if you want to believe in the over-commercialisation of Christmas, if you want to believe that it is all a waste of resources, be my guest! I merely ask that you look into the eyes of a child as they unwrap their presents on Christmas morning and say to me: 'Christmas doesn't mean anything anymore.'

I would like to say that I wrote this in the early hours of Christmas morning, oblivious and disregarding to the 'festive season', but I did not.  I wrote it some days ago and will soon be firmly ensconced in front of my 'TV' watching 'the Great Escape', 'Mary Poppins' and 'Casablanca' and desperately trying to remember what it was like to be five years old"