In early December 1988, when I was mourning the recent and very sudden loss of someone very dear to me, I was in a market on a miserable, cold and sleety day. There were Christmas lights up, a brass or silver band was playing carols, and I had on an earpiece and was listening to the radio with half an ear as I browsed Christmas decorations on a market stall.
The news came on and it was announced that some number - 22, I think - young women working in a Christmas decoration factory in China had been burnt to death after fire had broken out and the fire escape doors to the room or floor in which they worked, had been chained closed. I turned the box of decorations over and out jumped at me the words 'made in China' I dropped the box as if it had just burnt me.
Since that day, I have disliked Christmas here in the UK. It is all so wrong. If it is to be a religious celebration, why is it so commercialised and at the wrong time of year? Put it at the correct time of year please which is not midwinter then I won't mind so much. If it is meant to be about peace and goodwill and stuff like that, fine, have the goodwill to leave me in peace and stop pestering me to go to some grim hall full fake jollification and people with whom I have nothing in common, to be offered food I heartily dislike or won't eat. Don't try to inveigle me into celebrating it! My Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu etc compatriots don't try to inveigle me into participating in their religious celebrations, why do the Christian ones insist on doing so?
And above all, if it is a religious celebration associated with the founder of a religion which supposedly celebrates peace and goodwill why the f@ck does it need people to be so very exploited that they get burnt to death in the production of bl00dy tinsel and plastic reindeer?
If we are to enjoy a mid-winter/winter solstice/coming of the light/New Year celebration - as was the older (pre-Christian) customs in these islands - with a mish-mash of lights, feasting and greenery at the darkest, hardest, slowest (in subsistence agriculture) time of the year, let's remove religion from it entirely and stop pretending. Perhaps we could start being honest and could call it the winter celebration of over-consumption...
However, it seems to me that it is ripe for a conversion into a celebration of a very different nature - in fact of nature itself in the widest possible sense - and that adapting modern technology to illuminate one of the few bits of accessible remaining greenery at this time of the year is a worthy thing to do (as long as people tidy the lights away after a few weeks) in the spirit of our pagan ancestors persuasion of the light to return, and the year to begin afresh. So I'd give a big tick to the wayside evergreens decorated with solar-powered fairy lights, in fact that's just given me an idea!
