Once again the wheel rotates to its mid-winter position and once again I contemplate the forthcoming spectacle of silliness. In five days a fair-sized portion of humanity will plunge itself into an uncontrolled orgy of superstition lubricated by greed. There is no sense to it, no reason for it, no purpose about it. The thing’s mad.
One would think that I, a musician and artist, would have reconciled myself to illogic long ago; my profession, after all, dwells at least as much in the realm of instinct as in rational thinking. But I have never managed to make the leap; either something makes sense or it doesn’t, and the spectacle of Christmas remains to my mind utterly reason-free and inexplicable.
Children believe what their elders tell them, whether that be the horsepuckey of a fat old geezer on a sleigh or the blather of hokum about pregnant virgins. They see no absurdity in the seasonal witches’ brew: trees killed and strewn with foreign objects, processionals and mumbo-jumbo, horrid treacly pop tunes, crushing crowds, wrapped boxes, alcohol abuse, weight gain, stressed-out bitchy relatives, snow (plastic or natural), pious mewlings from self-appointed panjandrums of public morals.
But for an adult with a morcel of common sense, Christmas is a chaotic melange of nonsense. Why bother with any of it? Perhaps the only thing lacking is enough people to pipe up and point out — ostinato and fortissimo as necessary — that the emperor is indeed stark naked, and no amount of rationalizing, theorizing, or historicizing will contribute so much as a fig leaf to remedy the situation.
There is nothing good to be said for it. Those who claim to be celebrating the birth of a religion’s founder are contributing mightily to the ongoing ignorance of a species that struggles, usually unsuccessfully, to rid itself of its own tragic gullibility. Those who see late December as a time for retail incontinence are feeding the fires of greed that burn almost as brightly as those of stupidity. Those who view it as a time to be nice to other people would do well to practice that kindness regularly, instead of doling out their charity in carefully-measured spoonfuls during the “holiday season.”
Christmas as a ghostly festival is already well on its way to obsolescence, just like the sun-god supplications that were its predecessors, as that conflation of lies and real estate that constitutes its governing institution rots slowly but surely from within. Christmas, as a retail festival, is an invention of smarmy Victorian boosterism and as such belongs in granny’s attic right alongside the stereopticons, antimacassars and Rogers figurines.
And if we, as a culture, feel obliged to set aside a particular time of the year to practice kindness and charity to our fellow travellers — well, we’re not fooling anybody, are we?