Santa’s
peeved and you can hardly blame him.
He’s
dealing with ongoing supply chain snarls, inflation killing
his margins and his Zoomer staffers all want a WFH arrangement
and yet another day off, this time to attend a friend’s
fur baby’s ‘life celebration.’
Like
us, he’s feeling unsettled by the state of things, while
the state of things steadily sucks the joy out of the Yuletide
season.
The
first sign Christmas 2023 was in crisis appeared in Washington,
DC when gusty weather toppled America’s National Christmas
tree and the wall-to-wall reaction on social media was ‘Oh
look! That’s our country right now!’
The
town of Orillia saw DC’s fallen tree and said ‘hold
my beer.’ Simcoe County has more than 13,000 hectares
of forest yet for its annual tree reveal Orillia’s BIA
(Business Improvement Area) settled on a dead one…
Reactions
on social media ranged from WTF? to WTAF? I showed the picture
to my friend Joanne who commented, in a tone as brittle as
those limbs too lifeless to hold ornaments, “That’s
Canada’s economy.”
Right
now, in Iowa’s State Capitol, there’s a satanic
altar on display, featuring a gilded-goat-headed figure of
the pagan idol Baphomet, cloaked in red and holding a pentangle.
A satanic tree strewn with blood-red lights resembling little
demon eyes is currently on display at the National Railroad
Museum in Ashwaubenon, Wisconsin. Last year, the Satanic Temple
of Illinois wedged a crocheted serpent on a pile of apples
in between a Nativity scene and a menorah.
Ugly
trees, satanic shrines and altars, retailers struggling under
the weight of inflation and now a logjam in the Panama Canal
delaying Christmas decoration deliveries—none of these
are related but added up it starts to feel like Christmas
is under siege.
On
top of all this, as the season was gearing up, we lost Shane
McGowan, the man behind Fairy Tale of New York, a song that
swings from merriment to misery. It feels like a poignant
overlap that he would make his exit during an especially miserable
period in New York’s history.
Back
in the day, we had Miracle on 34th Street, the timeless Christmas
classic about a Manhattan department store Santa who swears
he’s the real thing. This year, a few blocks from 34th,
at Rockefeller Centre’s annual Tree Lighting, it was
a miracle nobody died. Mayhem ensued when the “river
to the sea” mob arrived and picked a fight with the
NYPD. One protestor tore down an American flag and shouted
“Allahu Akbar,” another stole a cop’s hat
and set it on fire and yet another barked at a line of NYPD
officers “which one of y’all want to get Derek
Chauvin’d?”
The
late writer and notorious humbug Christopher Hitchens was
a hawk when it came to both Iraq and the War on Christmas.
He famously described the season as a “moral and aesthetic
nightmare” and complained about the “tinny, maddening,
repetitive ululations” of canned Christmas music. Since
he was such a contrarian, I’d expect him to soften on
that position now that most cultural institutions and big
corporations have erased Christmas symbols and traditions
from their day-to-day.
It’s
hard to fathom the level of cultural self-hatred that allowed
this to happen. What began as a milquetoast attempt to show
good manners and consideration to others in the name of racial
diversity and equity morphed into “Happy Holidays,”
holiday trees, replacing nativity with ‘winterludes’
and vegan-centric Christmas tables consumed in grim athleisure.
Hitchens
wrote his anti-Christmas diatribe in 2008, at the height of
the War on Christmas, which started sometime in the early
90s, steamrolled during the early 2000s and waned slightly
in recent years. Lately, things have been heating up. For
this, we can thank the KKK (Killjoy Kristmas Karens) who use
climate as a stick to beat the remaining traces of joy out
of the season. Christmas, according to environmentalists,
is the world’s greatest annual eco-disaster, like Chernobyl
but with glitter and shortbread. The ugly Christmas sweater
(the very essence of ‘fast fashion’), meat consumption,
lights and flights to visit relatives are a partial list of
things supposedly ruining the planet.
Have
you seen this?
A snap-less Christmas cracker, like a paper straw, is no fun.
Well, who said anything about fun? What do you think this
is? Bedford Falls? Santa’s Wonderland? Nope. This is
2023. If you want fun, buy a time machine.
