This is a seasonal update on an old post here http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2006/04/14/happy-easter/ which was all about Easter being good. Sadly, in the interest of balance, it has to be matched by a post that tells you Christmas is rubbish.

This is obviously not true if you are under 12. The judgement can go either way for the next 6 years or so. After that, it is basically a rubbish holiday, made bearable only by watching under 12 year-olds enjoy it.

(And that enjoyment is marred when you realise that the most innocent children can be successfully turned into grasping consumer monsters, after you’ve spent a few years teaching them that greed is good and will be annually rewarded.)

It’s not even on the date of the winter solstice. It’s a few days afterward, so Christmas is sneakily trying to pretend it’s not really a pagan midwinter festival. Come on. This just shows that priests couldn’t even be bothered to work out the date of the midwinter solstice properly. (Hint to the Christian hierarchy, megalithic circles may be the way to solve this problem. It’s apparently worked before.)

This is a time of year when you have to wake up in the dark and come home from work in the dark. By definition, this is extremely depressing. Imagine what it’s like at the North Pole. There must be about ten minutes of daylight for those poor captive elves who have to make and pack all this consumer trash. Does anyone care about them?

It’s the middle of the winter. I like the idea of a big feast to take your mind of that. Why did we turn this natural response into a festival the run-up to which is so stressful that we need a fortnight to wind down?

Who thought we’d feel better about the cold and damp and darkness if we started spending all our money? Even getting into debt, so we can give away our money – having first transmuted it into novelty slipper sock and “designer” label deodorant form – mainly to people who don’t need it. Or, at least, who wouldn’t need it if they weren’t also becoming indebted in the process of giving away all theiir money. This seems to me to be a definite misunderstanding of the whole rich man and eye of the needle thing.

Any holiday from work is normally welcome. Why do the work holidays you get at Christmas come when you don’t need them? Boxing Day? Why? Even more redundant are the free days between Boxing Day and New Year’s Eve. There is nothing to do in this week except regret how much you’ve spent/eaten/drunk in the week before Christmas – when you would have actually welcomed a holiday so you could shop/drink/cook and eat the odd foods that are required at Christmas. (If these ritual food items are so good, why doesn’t anyone eat them at any other time?). Bah humbug, etc.

There are websites celebrating naff Christmas things. http://www.uglychristmaslights.com/ has photos of decorations that are not in fact particularly ugly (though the site is) but which laugh in the face of all those adverts that tell us not to leave our TVs on standby because of global warming. There are obviously people who would choose to be reincarnated as Blackpool, if they were Buddhists.

There are some Christmas things on http://www.worldofkitsch.com/features/kitschmas2003/index.html, although I thought I had invented the concept of Kitschmas, so I feel a bit cheated by this site’s very existence. I am baffled by “Or, you can discuss kitschmas in the chat room and messageboard. “. Are there really people who want to discuss naff Christmas things with other people? Well, if there are, this is clearly the place for it.

Oh blast, I want to go there now, just to see what they talk about. And sneer, of course, as I am doing here …… There is something intriguingingly circular about going to a web forum just to sneer at people who are meeting just to sneer at naff things. Ha, start sneering at me now and we will have achieved escape velocity, thus opening up a wormhole to an alternative sneer-powered universe. Where you can power a TV on standby by merely thinking of the sort of music they have listed in their Kitschest music quiz. (Beegees, Abba, Village People, and Odyssey, if you are interested. Who are Odyssey? No, on second thoughts, its better not to know.)

http://www.worldofkitsch.com/features/kitschmas2003/treegame.html lets you decorate a virtual tree to excess. (Don’t bother, except in Internet Explorer. It will just sit there if you try it in Firefox)