Christmas should not just be for Christmas says Patrick Cash…
What is Christmas?
We all know its immediately apparent origins, the birth of Jesus Christ, making the 25th December a date to be celebrated and lauded by followers of the Christian religion all over the world for 2,000 years.
But the concept of the winter holiday stretches far further back than even this; before Christianity ever arrived on these shores there were many pagan festivals dedicated to the theme of rebirth and anticipation of Spring scheduled for this time of year. They were built upon the simple foundations of gift-giving, merrymaking and shared warmth.
Today’s Christmas phenomenon has appeared to have largely transcended its religious roots, entrenched instead as the foremost secular symbol of humanity’s ability to achieve goodness in a troubled world.
Of course there are many naysayers abound who revel in criticizing and denigrating this season. Some of their accusations, admittedly, may be steeped in a certain level of truth: the commercial and mercenary aspects surrounding the holiday are rampant. Year on year the same old songs come on earlier in the shops; festively themed adverts can sometimes be glimpsed as soon as August.
Businesses salivate over the period as a time for profit rather than charity. Christmas and its gift-giving entanglement is a fiscally lucrative enterprise secretly engineered by the Illuminati to trick our flock of blindly following sheep into accepting and endorsing a merciless capitalist regime.
Shops become glinting, winking shrines of gaudy décor the moment November – if not October – hits and the words ‘Christmas’, ‘seasonal’ and ‘festive’ are attached to every label. Christmas, we are lead to believe the sad truth is, is in fact a great meretricious layer of artifice and falsity smothered over a slumbering globe.
“Beneath the jail bars of materialism, Christmas has become an enduring symbol to prove that we can be kind.”
Yet, just hold on there one cotton-picking second. Perhaps the retail industry does get over-enthusiastic and bullyingly forceful in their pushing methods to ‘sell, sell, sell’ at this time of year, and maybe ex-drama students dressed up as elves at Harrods aren’t going to make you believe in Santa Claus again.
But if we lay aside the dearly held veneer of cynicism for a moment, just look at the reverential favour that Christmas basks in within our culture. Indeed perhaps this is manifested in children because of the excitement associated with receiving presents (although not according to the John Lewis advert), but once we are grown-up and technically able to buy whatever we want for ourselves the excitement and pleasurable anticipation is still there for most of us.
Just look at the status updates on your newsfeed declaring how people have been filled with happiness thinking about the day itself, a Facebook group entitled ‘No matter how old I get I still can’t sleep on Christmas Eve’ has over 500,000 members.
Why should this magic and reverence still be there for us? Because, beneath the jail bars of materialism, Christmas has become an enduring symbol to prove that we can be kind. We may show that we have the ability to think and care about one another; our race is not as forsaken and lost to moral decadence as our televisions and news media would proclaim.
Whilst we have innumerable problems stretching across every continent and not one of us qualifies as wholly perfect, still in this festivity we display the foundations on which our societies are idealistically based: honour, strength, sharing and heart.
This is essentially the message that the ‘Occupy’ protests are trying to tell us, but we don’t need to be either protestors or Christians to join in with attempting a state of harmony in which we all benefit.
Evidently the most glaring counter-argument is that this mindset and adulation of particular virtues should not be confined just to one particular period of the year. But, the rest of the year we forget, it is at the end of the year that Christmas reminds us of what we can be once more.
