Bah Humbug: Abolish Christmas!
Christmas has become a fevered festival of hyper-consumerism, ghastly work parties and uncomfortable family tension.
Once a year is once too many. It's time to rein in the reindeer and put Frosty the Snowman on ice.
A sickly season saturated by overproduced adverts and cloying cliches, Christmas is, for many of us, a bitter reminder that we don't earn enough to buy the presents we'd like to give; that we don’t have an idealised relationship with an extended family that could make spending several days together bearable; that we don't have the rom-com-worthy relationship to justify matching ugly jumpers; and definitely don’t have the stores of earthly resources to warrant the wrapping and unwrapping and discarding thousands of tonnes of plastic tat.
And what of the run-up?
Tedious office Christmas parties where we must endure boozing and forced merriment at the behest of insecure managers.
Do we really need even more Decembers soaked in cooking alcohol, vomit-sweetened with Christmas music, and coated with cholesterol? Surely there's a better way to mark the solstice than this!
Scrooge came around to Christmas. But it was freely-chosen generosity towards peers, not obligatory overindulgence, that he learned from Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim. Even the ghost of Christmas Present might find present-day Christmas a bit much. It's time to put Christmas out on the pavement with the sawn-off tops of pine trees for the bulky waste collection.
