A Day to Say “No” - Alcyonenews

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Miscellany

Posted December 13, 2024

A Day to Say “No”

“Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue”.

Oscar Wilde

Christmas is the biggest holiday of the year, linking the year that was with the year to come. In the long gone agrarian epochs where the winter holiday originated, mid-winter was an idle time, conducive to relaxation, boredom and celebration. People would take advantage of the slow season to socialize for this was a break from the harsh work they had to do to produce sustenance for the winter months when food was scarce. Imagine if you can, a family confined in a small space without television, books, computers, cross-word puzzles and thumb-able telephones !

Religion spotted the potential of the winter holiday and targeted it for annexation. The clergy are adept in the art of promotion and quickly convinced the people that the great holiday was God made and God sent. They metamorphosed the Holiday into “holyday” to take advantage of the deity’s influence on the market, somewhat like the royals selling “By appointment to Her Excellency the Princess of Someplace”. After the deital connection took root, the clergy orchestrated rituals for the people to praise God and exalt his magnificence continuously lest the people forget the connection.

Perhaps by now some readers may see me as a pariah, blasphemous to God and to Santa Claus. Well, I turn around and say to them: it is not I who commercialized the Winter Holiday. It is others who turned it into a gigantic bazaar of “excesses”. Talk to those who send us to the banks to borrow money to spend on Holiday stuff. It is they who make us “celebrate” by lining up in the freezing dawn, ten-abreast to rush in when the doors open to grab the Boxing day “bargains”. It is they who ascertain we cannot lift our nose from the grindstone until we pay back the money we borrowed to “buy” the joy of the holiday.

It is the Christians who hijacked the Holiday and contaminated it with religion and they will not let go of the holiday. Year, after year they increase the persuasion, letting no one else get a word in edgeways at this “holyday”. The iron must be struck while red hot. In midsummer people would rather lick ice cream at the beach, splash in the water and chase a chance to “sin” rather than listen to the story of the reproductive rituals of God.

NB: I use “sin” as in the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) “An immoral act considered to violate divine law”. Period.

A most important aspect of Christmas commercialization is the word-deluge they rain on the young. During the cold winter days, we are soft targets for tall stories and children are very vulnerable, ready to absorb tales like the Genesis story. They are told that we celebrate the birth of the Son of God born to Mary, who was impregnated by a surrogate, angel Gabriel, who used a lily on Mary like my wife uses a brush to pollinate our dwarf lemon tree flowers to produce lemons.

Marshall McLuhan observed that the Medium is the Message. This makes God the message from the Clergy. Santa Claus was devised to warm the crowds to eliminate any resistance to the Clergy’s message. Personification of a notion is conducive to the promotion of such notions. For example Aphrodite personifies matters aphrodisial convincingly as Botticelli graphically states. Santa Claus transitions us from the prevailing reality of this “world of sin and woe” in Churchill’s words, to a world of Magic. He personifies exuberance, he is wholly jolly, as we all dream to be. Santa Claus is but an associate with God as he is a “saint”. And with thehelp of the establishment he sells “presents” for “obedience”.

These notions are ushered into the minds of the young submarine-surreptitiously. They are rammed into the crania of the young by parents, teachers, priests and other trained tall-tale purveyors. The words stick in the minds of the young as if with Gorilla glue, and become hard to dislodge, for the people to recover their innate conscience. They must not be allowed free reign over the Holiday but they are on the podium. And that is why I talk.

I have come through many Christmas holidays. As I remember, I enjoyed them all and I have memorabilia from many like a Murano ashtray that looks very pretty without butts and ashes.

I have said more than I wished, because there is more to be said. But now I digress to take a plunge into the Magic of the holiday with the old Francis Church masterpiece

“Yes Virginia there is a Santa Claus!”, as I have done in years past. It is beautiful.

Then, in that magic world, I will tell Santa Claus that there are a plethora of “do-gooders” working on us day in day out, the year around. We need someone to help us take a holiday from that. But we have no one to tell us about Earthly pleasures and I will ask him to do that, to metamorphose into a bright butterfly, and change his name to “Sin Claus”. I reckon we need a “Sin Claus”, someone who will listen to us, smile, turn his head, shut one eye, nod and and say nothing.

Then, as if by Magic, a bit like it happened to Anthony Quinn in Zorba the Greek or Louis Armstrong who will come to blow his trumpet and sing “What a Wonderful World” ...

Please join in, sing and sin along, with Louis, Sin Claus and me ...

Wishing Everyone, a merry sinful holiday.

Now I raise my glass of bubbly to Sandi who makes the Marketplace the paper to read on our shores.