To blog or not to blog

I’m so sorry. Really, I am. I’d meant to send you a Christmas card, and get you a gift, maybe even invite you round for a festive glass of wine, but it is too late now. Christmas has passed and all I can do is wish you Happy New Year.   In my defence, I hadn’t expected Christmas to happen so soon. I’d assumed it would take place on December 25^th as usual, not the second weekend in November. We didn’t even get the decorations up this year, or a tree. But you see, I just didn’t realise that the whole shebang had been brought forward, well, not until I was watching TV last Friday and by then it was too late to do anything.

It’s my own fault. I should have realised, what with the Christmas adverts starting in September, and all the extra catalogues we’ve been getting through the door for seasonal reductions on everything from bras to beds, sofas to sandwich makers.  I’m just a bit slow on the uptake these days. The clues were there, of course, with all the decorations up in town and even the most mundane product packaging redesigned with a festive feel. Holly on your toilet roll – a more likely combination has yet to be conceived.

But the chocolate penny finally dropped at the end of last week when I saw an advert on telly for a joint of beef. And thank heavens I saw it, or Christmas would have passed me by totally, without so much as a mince pie or turkey sandwich.  The advert in question came from Morrisons (to whom I shall be forever indebted) and took me by surprise. With the jingle of bells and the generic Christmas tune the short ad promoted their special Christmas offer of outstanding value on their joints of beef. An offer which ends today, 9^th November. A Christmas offer that ends in November. Well, by extrapolation I could only conclude then that Christmas occurred this past weekend, if an offer promoted as being for Christmas finishes today, that must mean that Christmas has happened, surely?

Or maybe Morrisons are blatantly exploiting an extraordinarily debatable proximity to Yuletide in a way that I find offensive in the extreme and deeply worrying.

I am not a card-carrying religious zealot by any means and my relationship with church is very much of the ‘hatch, match and dispatch’ variety, but I really do think things are getting out of hand. Christmas now seems to take up a quarter of the year in terms of its commercial exploitation, and more so if you consider the ongoing debts that linger way past the last remnants of turkey.

Has the spirit of Christmas not mutated beyond recognition to a beast of commercialism and the house of prayer become a den of unscrupulous thieves, forcing us to bow to an entirely different deity?

I understand that it is the most profitable time for retail and that in a recession shops need to tout for all the business they can get, but how on earth can anyone justify a “Christmas Special” that runs for a week in November? This is not the spirit of Christmas. And I’m not talking a Dickensian ideal, I know that the world changes and Christmas is now a very different beast.  In a multicultural society maybe we have to find a common thread to such celebrations to make them palatable for all, but we seem to be trying to take the Christ out of Christmas and perverting everything about it. I wonder what the impact would be if we tried to reinvent some of the other religious festivals to the same extent. What of Ramadan or Diwali, Yom Kippur or Hanukkah? The suggestion of renaming the December holiday to “Wintermas” is no more ridiculous than the invented concepts of Mothers’/Fathers’/Valentines’ day (known as Hallmark Holidays because they were invented largely for commercial purposes).

Part of me wishes that the emphasis were more aligned with the little drummer boy than the wise men and their expensive gifts. Christmas isn’t about the birth of Christ anymore and has been rebranded almost beyond recognition. The pagan worship of the winter solstice was smothered by the Christian festival which in turn has become more a celebration of Santa Clause than anything else. And I fear that in recent years even that concept has been bastardised and corrupted to leave us with little beyond the hollow shell of commercialisation.

Our economy seems to now rely on this season and appears determined to stretch the run-up to Christmas further and further each year.  It is a con. Does Morrisons really need to cite Christmas as the reason they are reducing a joint of meat for a few days in the autumn, and does the fact that they are doing it not diminish and devalue any meaning left in the advent period? It feels like bullying, increasing pressure to pay more and more, give bigger and better, spend, spend, spend and to hell with the consequences. Apparently my Christmas won’t have any value unless I buy a new settee, TV, kitchen or bike. What on earth would make me think that I need a new shower to be able to celebrate the nativity? “And Mary laid the baby Jesus in a whirlpool bath while the three wise men dressed in the latest fashion gave gifts of iPods, digital cameras and a new Sat Nav which proclaimed “at the next Star of David turn right and you will have reached your destination.”’

We are bombarded with offers and discounts and bargains and wrapped up in linguistic tricks that advertisers think we won’t notice.  There is an ad at the moment for a printer. It asks, “have you stopped printing because it costs too much for replacement ink?”  And suggests you should “buy an all-in-one printer and save over £100 a year.”  Now I’m no mathematician but let’s do some sums. I’m spending nothing on printing at the moment. I have to buy a new printer and paper. I will have to buy more inks for that printer. How do I end up spending less than zero in all this? It is the same as these seemingly endless sofa sales (the price reductions being endless, not the sofas) where we move from the Christmas sale into the New Year sale which leads into the Spring and Easter and Summer sales and so on round the calendar: it is just a way to mislead us into thinking we are getting a bargain. I don’t particularly need a new sofa, so no, DFS, buying a new one from you will NOT save me £500 it will COST me £700 and I also see your ‘get out of jail free’ small print that says your pledge of guaranteed delivery before Christmas is “available on some models” but probably not the ones anyone actually wants. I’m not saying that regulations are being breached but there is an underlying trend towards ambiguity. Retail is about creating desire but we are being manipulated to live beyond our means.

Where is the civic responsibility in that? I don’t claim to be an economist, but surely there must be a tipping point? Sooner or later this is all going to back-fire. I’m sure I oversimplify when I wonder when our buy-now-pay-later culture really is going to implode, and more than it has in this recession. How much more can the banks be propped up, when will the gold reserves finally run out? I can understand the principals of needing a healthy retail sector which generates demand for products and then benefits manufacturing, which can go on to produce more products more efficiently and at lower cost. I can see that our economy needs to be competitive and attract foreign investment but are we not also at risk of the beast becoming too hungry and devouring everything?  Yes, Christmas will aid retail, but with public debt at £800 billion can we really carry on like this? I quote from the Times Online – 19^th September 2009:

Britain is clocking up debt at a rate of £6,017 per second. Net borrowing for the first five months of the financial year stood at £65.3 billion, compared with £26.1 billion at the same stage last year. Total borrowing soared past the £800 billion mark for the first time and total state debt as a proportion of national output reached 57.5 per cent.

Just to pay the interest on its ballooning debts the Government must find more than £30 billion a year — about £500 for every man, woman and child in the country.

I won’t be getting into further debt this Christmas. I just can’t do it. I’m not sorry about that either – maybe I should be, maybe I’m a bad person for not being prepared to spend hundreds of pounds on gifts for my parents, my partner, my nieces, my friends. Maybe I’m not helping prop up our economy by injecting it with its Christmas fix. The Ads on telly seem to work on our sense of guilt and greed in equal measure but I refuse to be bullied like this anymore.  I am tempted to not send any cards this Christmas – I can come up with a dozen good reasons for that from ecological to financial but when I think about it I send the majority of cards for the wrong reasons anyway. If I really cared about Michael from College I’d write to him throughout the year. I just don’t want him to think badly of me for not sending. And that is the trap. Do I really need to send a card to my Mum? We speak every evening on the phone. What does a card add to that relationship? And why should David and I feel obliged to buy each other cards to proclaim our love when we do that every day through our words, our actions and our deeds? We’ve all fallen for the bait set by the commercial conglomerates who have built up such a ritualistic dependency that we don’t know how to break free.

The circle has to be broken.  Not sending a card does not mean I think any less of you – it’s just that I spent the money on a bargain joint of beef in November instead.   Now then, where does a chap buy an Easter Egg around here?

• On the first day of Wintermas the shops all gave to me a “buy one get one free”
• On the second day of Wintermas the shops all gave to me, two discount vouchers and a “buy one get one free”
• On the third day of Wintermas the shops all gave to me three months to pay, two discount vouchers and a “buy one get one free”
• On the forth day of Wintermas the shops all gave to me four credit coupons, three months to pay, two discount vouchers and a “buy one get one free”
• On the fifth day of Wintermas the shops all gave to me  five late bills, four credit coupons, three months to pay, two discount vouchers and a “buy one get one free”
• On the sixth day of Wintermas the shops all gave to me, six visa statements, five late bills, four credit coupons, three months to pay, two discount vouchers and a “buy one get one free”
• On the seventh day of Wintermas the shops all gave to me seven default notices, six visa statements, five late bills, four credit coupons, three months to pay, two discount vouchers and a “buy one get one free”
• On the eigth day of Wintermas the shops all gave to me eight debt management programmes, seven default notices, six visa statements, five late bills, four credit coupons, three months to pay, two discount vouchers and a “buy one get one free”
• On the ninth day of Wintermas the shops all gave to me nine county court judgements, eight debt management programmes, seven default notices, six visa statements, five late bills, four credit coupons, three months to pay, two discount vouchers and a “buy one get one free”
• On the tenth day of Wintermas the ships all gave to me ten IVAs, me nine county court judgements, eight debt management programmes, seven default notices, six visa statements, five late bills, four credit coupons, three months to pay, two discount vouchers and a “buy one get one free”
• On the eleventh day of Wintermas the shops all gave to me a file for bankruptcy, ten IVAs, nine county court judgements, eight debt management programmes, seven default notices, six visa statements, five late bills, four credit coupons, three months to pay, two discount vouchers and a “buy one get one free”
• On the twelth day of Wintermas the shops all gave to me a shattered global economy, a file for bankruptcy, ten IVAs, nine county court judgements, eight debt management programmes, seven default notices, six visa statements, five late bills, four credit coupons, three months to pay, two discount vouchers and a “buy one get one free”