Christmas and consumerism

I was just wandering round Sainsbury's yesterday amidst the pre-Christmas melee. It was about as bad as you would expect: an asexual orgy of frozen turkeys, eight-feet-deep trays of sprouts, and more broccoli than you could eat in four lifetimes (especially if you don't like broccoli). The trolleys were like dodgems, and were all full of food which would probably soon be dumped - either before or after being eaten.

So, everything ship shape and as expected. The more you consume at Christmas, the better the Christmas will be - so the illogic of modern capitalism goes. In fact, as I wandered around (purposely annoying the more rabid shoppers with my laid-back pace and whistling of Aida) the supermarket, it struck me that consumerism is locked in an indirectly proportional relationship to meaning. The more we consume - and particularly the more conspicuously we consume - the less the event for which we're consuming means. The more we've consumed as a society every Christmas - in terms of booze, food, t.v. and presents - the less Christmas means in a spiritual sense. The more the cost of weddings has spiralled, the less they've come to mean in a social sense - the divorce figures prove that. The more ostentatious funerals are, the less we really think about the spiritual side of them. As I say, the more money we spend as a society on something, the less that something means.

None of this comes as a surprise. Everyone knows that the most over-the-top weddings are often the hollowest; everyone knows that no one's interested in the true pagan - let alone Christian - meaning of Christmas any more, despite everyone spending far more cash on the festive season that at any other time in history.

But what's noticeable is that the mathematical formula:

SPIRITUAL MEANING% =

100

________________

CONSUMERISM%

... brings about a certain desperation in the human race, when the variable CONSUMERISM% is in the ascendant. Hence the people dashing round the supermarket. Hence the desperate turkey-buying. Hence the desire to pig out even more than we in the West normally pig out.

Not that pigging out should be underrated. After all, if it's all we've got left - if SPIRITUAL MEANING% really is at a fairly low ebb - then we might as well give in disgracefully and join in the pigging and outing.

On not writing a great novel...

Pictured above...Santa writing the great Laplandian novel

Tis I again, after a bit of time off. I've been meandering around the house with various sickness symptoms caused by pregnancy. How come everyone is behaving like it's Christmas? Last time I checked there were twelve days and they don't start on December 2nd. The town was full of slavish shoppers purchasing everything in sight. Look I'm not down on Christmas, quite the opposite. I love the holiday season. One of the best things is that delicious period in between Christmas and New Year when time gets suspended and you can do your own thing, and everything is pleasant and xmassy. It's just that that time is not now, it's frustrating! Plus what's the deal with Epiphany? In other words where is it in this country? Other countries mark the day, our celebrations come down on Jan the 1st, even earlier sometimes.

As the more diligent readers of this blog will be aware, we've got cable. This means that you can watch 7 episodes of 'Only Fools and Horses' in a row if you so wish. Actually I like this programme because Del Boy is rather like my dad, well my dad's a Greek Cypriot version. The resemblance is uncanny, honest.
Normally I would not dream of parking myself on a sofa and staring at the tv but it's useful for pregancy sickness. The most ridculous thing is flicking through the channels, there are technically seven or eight hundred of the buggers. Let's do a flick...Scrubs, Takeshi's Kingdom, property programmes, Hugh Fernely-Wittingstall out with his upper class pals shooting passing partridges, Whose Line Is It Anyway? So it can be a Friday night in 1989 on a Sunday tea time. Cable obliterates time, you could watch Dallas at 3am if that's your bag, Tenko at breakfast, despite the fact that these were once prime-time shows but in the cable universe time is irrelevant. So despite my better judgement I sit and stare at the top 30 christmas TV moments. Yeah, writing the great English novel ain't going to happen tonight.

The Age of Hypocrisy

'I fear we are a stupid people' (Thomas Carlyle).

If asked (which I haven't been) to characterise our age, I think I'd say it was The Age of Hypocrisy. Every age has its besetting sin, and ours (I think) is hypocrisy. Shame it's not lust or gluttony - that'd be more interesting. In fact, we're always being told by the Puritans of the world that lust and gluttony are our main sins - all those pictures of binge drinkers on the t.v. news suggest as much. But these images are themselves mere symptoms of a deeper sin: hypocrisy. After all, are we to believe that all the politicians and media whores who preach at us about binge drinking go home at weekends to read Middlemarch and drink Horlicks? No, they've more than likely been drinking and coke-ing it before, after and during the very news broadcast on which they tell us not to.

Shameless hypocrisy is ubiquitous in the modern age: the guy who declared war on Iraq is now Peace Envoy to the Middle East; the same government that talks about 'respect' invades other countries willy-nilly; alcohol companies produce adverts promoting 'drinking sensibly' (I mean, come off it); people who weren't good at being parents themselves run parenting classes; health and safety pretends to be about health and safety rather than 'please don't sue us'; people preach to us about carbon emissions whilst building more airports; top charity workers earn per week fifty times more than one of the people they're meant to help will do in a lifetime; ecologists drive and fly around telling everyone else not to drive and fly around; everyone seems to be preaching to everyone else about what they weren't good at in the first place.

And, of course, one of the most surreal forms of hypocrisy by which we are currently best is Christmas. Christmas, Christmas, Christmas: it's everywhere at the moment, and has been since October. Every shop window pretends to wish us a merry Christmas, every advert promises us a snowy heaven. For a start, let's be honest for a moment: snowy heavens don't happen any more. It's all a lie.

But it's a lie in a much more worrying sense: these days, Christmas is over before it's begun. Christmas starts in October, and starts to grind to a halt sometime in mid-December. My mother went to some department store last year in mid-December to buy some Christmas decorations. "Oh no," she was told, "don't be silly. That's well over now. No, of course we won't be buying more in. The season's been and gone." Most shops, at the very least, start the sales in the week before Christmas, and take all the Christmas decorations down on Christmas Eve. So Christmas is a peculiarly Derridean enterprise, in that it really is over before it's begun. By Christmas day, all that's left is to hand out the presents people couldn't afford, and eat all the food no one can really manage. The 25th December doesn't really exist as such any longer, let alone the other days of Christmas. I think this is spiritually, morally and emotionally unhealthy, maybe disastrous, for people in this country: everyone looking forward to something that doesn't exist.

Back in the 1970s, when "I were a lad," people and shops and churches alike at least pretended that Christmas consisted of twelve days. We sang 'The Twelve Days of Christmas,' didn't put the decorations up till twelve days before Christmas, and the shops didn't even re-open till a few days after Christmas. The shops never took down their decorations prematurely. They never seemed quite so exploitative or voracious.

Obviously, this was a different kind of untruth, in that the shops back then were still only interested in Christmas insofar as it fattened their pockets. They were only pretending to be interested in Christmas; they were only pretending to take part in the Festive Season and the twelve days so they could make money in a different way to the Christmas-Eve-is-the-end-of-everything, boom-and-bust, take-it-and-run, end-of-the-world capitalism of today. They thought they might make money over the whole twelve days of Christmas, selling treats, cashing in on people's seasonal goodwill. So it was just a different form of hypocrisy, spread over a different time span.

But maybe some forms of hypocrisy are better than others. If we have to live in the Age of Hypocrisy, perhaps it'd be better for the shops at least to pretend that they care about Christmas itself, and the whole of the Season, rather than bare-faced exploitation, in which Christmas is blatantly a money-making enterprise, and the hypocrisy is just an open secret. Otherwise, we might just as well give up all the snow-ridden lies about Christmas - we might just as well abandon the whole idea of a Festive Season - and just have a 'Financial Transactions Season,' in which we hand over lots of our cash to the shops in return for rubbish, which self-destructs at midnight on the 24th December.

(Thomas Carlyle, not Father Christmas)