Yo ho ho

As we probably all know, Xmas was originally a Germanic pagan festival, Yule, long before being appropriated by the Christian church. The original purpose was to celebrate the winter solstice – the turning point of the year - after which the days slowly lengthen again. 

Even in those early days the celebrations revolved around eating way more than necessary, and drinking a lot of alcohol, albeit at a time when such practices were the exception rather than the norm.

With the decline of the Church, the parasitic Christian overlay has clearly become as tokenistic as the Dickensian myth of the “White Christmas” so, more recently, the festival has been further appropriated, and commodified, by the machinery of capitalism, creating a grotesque & cloyingly sentimental orgy of consumption which epitomises the unsustainable fallacy of market economics. 

As the holiday approaches, if you haven’t already done so, I would urge you to read Monbiot’s excellent essay on the destructive nature of materialism, and any of the several recent exposés of the reality behind Amazon’s global empire of easy consumerism (ref) (ref).