Martin Hannan: Christ is lost in a season of excess

Published on Tuesday 20 October 2009 09:40

IN COMMON with a few other inventions that I could name, Scotland makes a spurious claim to have created the world's first Christmas card.

Supposedly invented by Charles Drummond of Leith, the cards issued in 1841 were not in fact Christmas cards, for a very good reason. Back then, good old Presbyterian Scotland did not actually celebrate Christmas very much, if at all, and the actual words on the card stated 'A Guid New Year and mony o' them'.

The first seasonal cards, therefore, were plainly good Scottish New Year's greetings, but they proved popular and two years later in London, the first commercial Christmas cards were sold. There you go again – the English stealing all our best ideas and making money out of them, just as Rowland Hill did with the adhesive postage stamp, first dreamed up a few years earlier by James Chalmers of Dundee, and won't both men be birling in their graves at what is happening to the Royal Mail?

The fact is that I'm with the old Presbyterians on this one. Christmas should be banned, or at the very least restored to its original status as a day on which to celebrate the birth of a carpenter's son from Nazareth by practising his message 'love one another'.

Look around you. It's the middle of October and already the shops and stores are beginning to display their pre-Christmas advertising.

Hotels and bars are festooned with signs encouraging you to book early for your work's Christmas Party, an occasion for licentiousness which would have outraged our Protestant forebears.

The television stations will soon be promoting their tawdry Christmas specials, puffed by z-list celebrities wearing false smiles of fake bonhomie. Weasely politicians are even now berating their speechwriters to come up with Yuletide platitudes about peace and love and decency, all things which are strangers to their normal amorality.

The other day I shared a conference platform with a decent guy who for some reason got involved in politics. Ewan Aitken, the former leader of Edinburgh Council, will forever have to live with the tag of being 'the Grinch who stole Christmas,' having featured in one of this newspaper's best-ever front pages when we showed him under that headline and coloured him green.

I think he's forgiven us, and he winningly explained to our audience of public service PR people about the circumstances which led up to him being unfairly accused of 'banning' Christmas, when in fact council managers were just being over-zealous in implementing guidelines about filming of school Christmas parties. And given recent stomach-churning stories down south, who is to say they were wrong?

Ewan's main point, which I echoed, was that as long as there is Christmas, there will be stories about officialdom wanting to ban it. We've all read or heard about the stories of councils wanting to ban or at least tone down Christmas celebrations for politically correct reasons, namely that Muslims or other religious types might be offended. Most of these stories are massively exaggerated, usually by right-wing politicians or tabloid editors giving 'leftie' councils a kicking to promote their own agenda.

Mind you, some councils are their own worst enemies. After the city's Christmas lights switch-on became part of a Winter Festival of Lights last year, one Oxford councillor whined 'we are not Christmas killers' – a headline-creating own goal if ever I saw one.

Other English councils warned staff about getting too close under the mistletoe and banned their employees sending Christmas greetings by e-mail, and Westminster Council last year set its environmental watchdogs on Debenhams in Oxford Street for playing carols too loud in their window displays. Officials as stupid as that make journalism easy.

I do not want a reduced Christmas for politically correct reasons, not least because most Muslims that I know are not offended at all by a celebration of the birth of Christ. Jesus and his mother Mary are, after all, important people in the Islamic faith, both being mentioned with respect in the Holy Qur'an.

No, modern Christmas has become a bloated pantomime, a season of capitalist excess in which we gorge ourselves with secular greed, paying a grudging lip service to the true message of Christmas perhaps by throwing a 16p tin of own brand beans into a supermarket's basket for the homeless.

It has become an orgiastic celebration of the banal, a parody of 'Christian' belief transformed into a jamboree of bad taste and boozed-up balefulness, and should be declared anathema.

I am reminded, of course, about what happened to Oliver Cromwell, the last man who actually banned Christmas in Britain, and John Knox, who saw Christmas as a Popish feast and decried it.

The fierce Calvinism of both the great Puritan and the founder of Presbyterianism saw them meet with ignominy. Cromwell's body was dug up after the restoration of the monarchy and he was posthumously executed, his head being stuck on a pole outside Westminster Hall until the flesh rotted away.

John Knox may have statues to his memory – the man from Haddington would have excoriated such showy display – but his last resting place is infamously marked by a yellow brick in the car park behind St Giles Cathedral.

The moral of their story is obviously that you shouldn't mess with Christmas, but I'll take my chances. Let's go back to a basic season of goodwill, pronto.