Added: 791 days ago by Kevin Holmes | Posted in: World | 6 Comments

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<div align='center'><a href='http://www.kontraband.com/blog/20460/The-Holidays-Are-Coming/'>The Holidays Are Coming...</a><br><div align='center'></div><br><a href='http://www.kontraband.com/blog'>See more like this on kontraband.com</a></div>

The holidays are coming. Well, according to one of the most recognisable and powerful symbols of post-industrial capitalist society, that's right Santa Claus, and that jingle that teaches my ears how to hate. Instead of the merry tune tinkling away I always imagine hearing the foreboding trailer for a new zombie movie. *in gravelly voice* "THEY'RE COMING to rip the skin from your wife's eyelids and use your son's intestines as a skipping rope..." But the holidays are ominously coming, to celebrate that strange time of year that mixes religion with greed, gluttony, lust (office Xmas party) and the other deadly sins. But that's because it's a holiday that's formed like a festive snowball rolling down the mountainside of history; starting with the pagan festival of Yuletide, before the Christians hijacked it like they do all good things, and gathering the snowy dust of Dickensian kindness and merriment, corporate mascots, and the modern onslaught of secular festivities: TV specials, Robert Zemeckis performance capture movies that desecrate the name of Back to the Future - all mixed with a dash of primitive-minded religious traditions, making a heady, toxic, mulled brew of nostalgia, farce, hypocrisy, capitalism, screaming children and joy to all mankind that leaves you feeling swollen, defeated, plucked and bewildered just like that Christmas turkey.

It's a hotch-potch of beliefs, ideals, wants and carnivalesque indulgence all sitting uncomfortably together like the image of crucified reindeer. A Frankenstein's monster wrapped in tinsel, something that has evolved over the centuries mutating and changing as our world has mutated and changed, so its greatest symbol is no longer a baby in a manger but a jolly, ruddy-faced bringer of material desires garbed in the colours of a corporation, set to a soundtrack of the lacklustre, nauseating sounds of Christmas singles past. Just another Hallmark holiday.

But what should it really be about? A festival to help us through the cold winter months when we get together with friends and family and drink and dine, a pagan feast? Or a celebration of the birth of the son of God, a celebration of the potent power of myth? Or a time for us to boost our Western economies by buying products we can't afford, to line the pockets of the men and women who can? Who knows. Just as long as I can watch another round of Christmas specials that feel like I'm being force fed mince pies until my intestines feel like a Christmas sausage. Programmes that are about as entertaining as gout. And the greasily sweet-cheese scented distaste of sleigh-bells ringing and chestnuts roasting and all the other sickeningly predictable crud that gets wheeled out, again, ritualistically. Except this is a ritual of excess and swinishness, of corporations and Christmas adverts playing up to the notion of family, love, kindness and sending a goat to Africa. When what's really going on is a world slowly, methodically, depressingly turning to sh#t. The symbol of Christmas should be of a melting snowman, covered in black soot, his smile contorted to a sullen resentment, one eye missing, a scarf hung around his neck like a noose, soon to be a puddle...

Yet we celebrate, celebrate a lie. The lie of Christianity and the lie that everything will be alright if you throw enough money at it, surround it in the warm glow of presents and shiny wrapping paper, and eat enough turkey and drink enough brandy and go to enough parties and fart your half digested bloated meals at your sleeping grandparents.

Christmas is a cliché wrapped in a cliché surrounded by clichés. I can't even bear to hear anyone say, "It gets earlier every year" any more. Yeah, well you say that earlier every f#cking year. People moaning about Christmas, just like me, is a cliché. So, I think, to stop me from choking on my own festive bile we need to take a year off, the whole Western world just ignore it for one year, all just carry on and do what you want. Nothing to see here. No need to shop for presents or act like hearing the same turgid carols again is a reason to grin like an elf that's just got a blow job off Mrs Claus. Let's not put up any decorations and see what happens. Most of us have never had a year in our lives when we weren't surrounded by its red, white and green. In most Western cultures, unless you're sitting in an abyss at the bottom of the Atlantic straits next to a giant squid and looking at the ruins of Atlantis, it's hard to avoid.

If we cancel Christmas perhaps the desolate grey expanse of the New Year with lack of funds and miserable weather might not seem so bad. So let's boycott it starting from right now. If you see some tinsel, tear it down and rip it up. If you hear some carols smash up where they're coming from, unless it's a child's face. Christmas can go shove a 20ft Norwegian spruce up its butt and go hibernate for a year, so we can collectively take a holiday from this holiday. Who's with me?

Added: 791 days ago by Kevin Holmes | Posted in: World | 6 Comments

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