After Christmas Rant

It is a canard, a hard to kill outrageous lie, that Christmas “became” materialistic.

Christmas is just the latest name for a Winter Solstice blowout of excess that stretches out unnumbered millennium prior to the birth of Christ; back to when agrarian societies first formed.  The harvest was finished, the chores were few, the first beer of the season was ready, and there was much grain and meat that must be eaten or go to rot.

“The Night Before Christmas” was a damnable fable

Here was a party that did not need an excuse!  Toss over the conventions of society and put the lord of misrule in charge if only for a few weeks before the hard cold settles in and the supplies of fatted calf run out.

As long as there has been this festival of excess, the establishment has tried to kill it; they’ve tried to tame it; but the Spirit of Saturnalia survives, yes even thrives, to this day.

“The Night Before Christmas” was a damnable fable written up on the orders of a PR cabal looking to tame the drunken, fornicating, and gluttonous lower classes of New York City. Clement Moore’s aim was to shame the rabble off the  street;  make them spend the day at home with their family; and quit ringing his doorbell demanding an offering of  food, drink, or money in exchange for a badly sung carol.

He injected guilt into the celebration by making it “for the children”. (Anytime you hear that phrase, know that those afflicted with overly tight sphincters are out to take something from you.)

Docile sheep that we are before the gods of Mass Communication, Americans have conformed to the point that we now call the natural holiday a “perversion” of the “true” holiday when in fact it is the other way around.

Try as he might, Moore could not keep a good holiday down. He was unable to kill our drunken parties, our pig-outs, and our fixation on sex. Bacchus absorbed his quiet day at home and transformed that into an orgy of gift giving, eating, drinking and, in the finer redneck homes, beating up the in-laws after lunch.

All Moore can lay claim to is making us feel guilty about it.  You’d think he was a Baptist Minister instead of an Episcopal Clergyman.

As a humorist and social iconoclast, I thank my lucky Bacchus that we have been able to keep the holiday as it was meant to be — a glorious, squalid, bacchanal that, done right, stretches from Thanksgiving Day all the way to January 6th.

Once “the day” is over, it is fashionable to complain about it. I am tempted to give a late Christmas gift to the next moaner — a tube of K-Y Jelly to loosen up their painfully tight sphincter.

We still have until January 6th!  Have a  Merry Christmas, a Ripping Good Saturnalia, and a Happy New Year!

Credit where due. This rant began its life as a comment on the Sanity on Edge Blog following someone uttering the standard complaint about Christmas materialism. After about 200 words, I realized that I had something suitable for posting and, selfish charlatan that I am, I cutnpasted it over to here and deleted it off her blog. Sorry ettarose!

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Tagged as: Christmas