Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Cancel, christmas, snowflakes

Christmas Is Problematic – Should It Be Cancelled By Snowflakes?

Christmas, as celebrated in the Western world, is an event of commerce and excess. It favours the rich and puts an unbelievable amount of pressure on the poor to meet the most meagre of societal expectations, putting many families into debt. While even the lucky can find societal pressure too much to cope with, and leads to a spike in suicide and self-harm.

Father Christmas himself is incredibly problematic, epitomising a colonial, patriarchal (the clue is in the name) figure, so that small children are brainwashed into accepting gifts from strange old white men break into homes at night, without asking questions.  Santa Claus has been race-bent from the original Middle Eastern Saint Nicholas of Turkey. One of the actual man's most celebrated tasks, which has somehow been twisted into the current version of events, is that he is said to have rescued three girls from being forced into prostitution by dropping a sack of gold coins through the window of their house each night for three nights so their father could pay a dowry for each of them. Could there be a more patriarchal state of events than these, now transformed into Father Christmas coming down the chimney with goodies? And could a later tale, about him resurrecting three children, who had been murdered and pickled in brine by a butcher planning to sell them as pork during famine have led to the current Christmas obsession with pigs in blankets?

But modern-day Santa is less of a kindly, religious miracle worker or coin giver, remade into the overseer of some 19th-century image of the industrial workhouse, filled with workers chosen for their diminutive height, working ceaselessly. Whereas in reality, the creation of such objects has been farmed out to East Asian sweatshops. Neither the fiction nor the fact is particularly palatable.

A system of rewards is imposed for compliance and acquiescence with the status quo, for being a "good girl" or "good boy", and are then left in your stockings. Parents are complicit in this lie and maintaining the lie down the generations. No wonder people grow up believing in conspiracy theories, QAnon or anti-vaxxers when they begin their life, learning about Santa Claus.

Basically, we shouldn't leave it up to Boris; we should all choose to cancel Christmas this year.

Or, maybe we should be allowed to criticise certain aspects of society, of culture, even seek to change them if possible, or provide incentives to those who can, without being caricatured by those with a reason to maintain the status quo, as part of some "cancel culture". Or deciding to embrace that charge for added impact. One can point out that the bathwater is a little murky without it being seen as some demand for the bathwater, baby and rubber duck to be immediately defenestrated. That might be the greatest Christmas present of all.

So, yes, it's also fine to watch Love Actually while you are at it. Ho ho ho, as Father Christmas definitely didn't say to those three girls in the original story.

Enjoyed this? Please share on social media!

Stay up-to-date and support the site by following Bleeding Cool on Google News today!