YULE BE LUCKY

It’s that time of year when, willy-nilly, everything seems to be coloured by its proximity to Christmas. I rather resent it. The whole thing only survives of course as a celebration of the triumph of capitalism. Were it primarily a religious occasion, as it once was, I should resent it no less. I prefer to think of this period as it was in the first place: a pagan festival called Yule, one which, as they did with all the culture they encountered that they deemed “heathen”, the Christians ruthlessly eradicated. If I didn’t find the term so studiedly ghastly, I might embrace it as “winterval”.

We still speak of Yule logs and find ourselves amusing when we wish each other “a cool Yule”, but realistically one has to accept that it’s become this amorphous mass called Christmas. Brought up in the low-church Anglican tradition and singing in my school choir, I was perforce made aware of the progression of the beginning of the Christian calendar from Michaelmas through Advent and so to Christmastide. The choral traditions that accrue at this time of year are certainly seductive – who doesn’t melt to Harold Darke’s version of ‘In the Bleak Mid-Winter’ or Boris Ord’s haunting ‘Adam Lay Ybounden’? This amounts to a cultural rather than a religious observance of the season. Many will be exercised by a similar spirit – actually attending a carol service, say, or going to Midnight Mass at the end of Christmas Eve which we, though rationalists, did as obeisance to our upbringing up until about 15 years ago.

But the infant Christ was shouldered aside long ago by a more demotic and transaction-friendly figure to embody the moment: the fat, jolly man in red with a white beard. Not that even he is entirely holding his own. It was the Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam (as they called New York) who brought to the New World the legend of Sinter Kraas. Clement Clarke Moore’s much-loved poem of 1823, ‘The Night Before Christmas’, popularized the figure of Santa Claus, which was cemented as an image by Thomas Nast’s caricature for Harper’s Weekly in 1863. Of all commercial enterprises, Coca-Cola made most of this image in its advertising. The British version of the character, Father Christmas, is now all but subsumed into the American Santa.

The style of Christmas celebration in Britain has further changed in recent years and I blame all those holidays taken in Florida by people with more money than taste. Americans want passers-by to see that they are celebrating the season. This ostentation has spread to the more modest homes of the British. The result is that street upon residential street is embellished with rippling lights, parked sleighs and abseiling Santas, a riot of ill-assorted effects that must quadruple each house’s annual electricity bill. The old carol urged us to “deck the halls with boughs of holly”. But I think that what was meant was the inside of the halls, to enhance an intimate and communal act of worship, not the outside to announce that you are competing with the Joneses next door and the Argos store in the Arndale Centre.

And of course, it is the houses that have no architectural distinction that thereby draw attention to themselves. Any dwelling of style and grace will vouchsafe no more than the glimpse through a drawing room window of lights on a tree and, what’s more, a tree not dressed until Christmas Eve (as is traditional) and dismantled promptly on the morning of Twelfth Night. Only the most vulgar householders can feel comfortable turning their homes into the festive equivalent of a lap-dancing dive in the red-light district of a down-at-heel holiday resort for two solid months.

Again, it is a sign of American commercial influence that the Yule season lasts so long. Macy’s start putting up their Christmas lights in mid-September. (Mind you – I wrote the foregoing few sentences for my book Common Sense in 2006 and this year there’s been a decided cutting-back. Instead of the lights going up in what seemed still to be early autumn, it was as if there were a pact among the self-decorating class, as a result of which nothing twinkled until last weekend. Now they’re up, though, perhaps the shameless householders will keep the lights till Easter).

A few years ago, the Radio 4 programme Saturday Review, in which a rotating group of critics debate the cultural openings of the week, turned its attention to the festive lights on Regent Street which, that year, centred on promotions for a seasonal Hollywood movie. The critics roundly deplored this development, as though earlier, less specific designs somehow betokened a less commercial philosophy. “Oh please” I shouted at the wireless. “Do you imagine the stores put up these lights in honour of the new-born Christ? They do it because they want you to come and gaze at the spectacle and come into the stores and spend money. If you want to attack lights that advertise a movie, focus on the real Satan here: attack capitalism”.

Christmas is now primarily an orgy of indulgence, even in these straitened times. Though the royal family’s trip en masse to St Mary Magdalene church at Sandringham on Christmas morning still brings the media, and television news the world over runs clips of the Pope speaking the same dreary message in dozens of languages from the balcony of St Peter’s Basilica, religious observance is marginal in the scheme of things. This Christmas Day, BBC1 has an hour of Eucharist in the morning and five minutes from the Gospel of Matthew late at night. Unless you count a 50-minute programme on BBC2 at 18.00 about Botticelli’s ‘Mystic Nativity’ – which anyway is from a series about painting, not religion – that is the sum total of religious broadcasting from British terrestrial television on the big day. I have not checked out the hundreds of satellite channels but, save for stations dedicated to evangelism, I suspect that between them they can muster no more.

It’s a tough call, deciding which has done more harm in the world: religion or capitalism. As widely anticipated, capitalism scuppered the Copenhagen summit and ensured that nothing was bound into law that would limit the freedom of capital to continue to plunder, exploit and despoil the planet. So, as I have argued here before, capitalism will surely ensure that life in the universe comes to an end. That’s quite a lot of harm.

Religion’s harm is more often on an individual basis, expressed in fear, guilt, self-loathing, cruelty, hubris, anti-rationality and all other charming qualities that prelates, priests and shamans preach. In this last week, the Bishop of Limerick, Donal Murray, has been prevailed upon by the Vatican to resign – you can just imagine the endless negotiation – over his failure to act on the abuse practised by priests in his diocese. Recently, we sent out Hanukkah ecards, including one to a friend in Israel that depicted, in a line drawing, a cantor intoning alongside a boy. The roguish legend on the card was “Here’s to you, Judaism! You’re all the tradition with none of the paedophilia”. Our friend replied, more gravely: “Would that this sentiment were true. It may not now or in the past have been as rampant as within the Catholic Church, but abuse by rabbis is definitely not unknown”.

Needless to say, wherever people have taken power over others, there is abuse. Catholicism particularly lends itself to paedophilia and pederasty because it has a culture of secrecy (the confession) overlaying the requirement that priests be unmarried and the tradition that the head of the church is “infallible”. Arguably even worse than the centuries of abuse practised by priests and nuns have been the knee-jerk denial and the instinct to protect the abusers rather than the abused. But that is religion all over. Islam honours the suicide bomber and ignores the innocent victim, dismisses the “infidel” (anyone not Moslem) and persecutes anyone who questions the absurd cruelties inflicted by fundamentalism on those too weak to fight back, especially women and children. The gruesomely misnamed “honour killing” is forgiven because men have all of the privilege and women none of the rights.

Meanwhile, in the evangelical churches of Christianity, evil is rewarded with the trappings of the secular world as though there is no possible contradiction. The unspeakable American preacher Oral Roberts died last week at 91, having led a life of fake cures and conspicuous consumption, courtesy of the backwoods idiots who flocked to his revivalist meetings. In a field where greed and fraud run rampant, Roberts was the wealthiest and the most shameless. One fact that he cannot escape: as I write, he is not resident in any version of heaven, but then nor would he be had he led an utterly blameless life.

In his most recent new year message, the pontiff Ratzinger – a man sitting on a throne, wearing a dress and protected by the Swiss Guard among whom being gay is practically compulsory – identified the main threat to the world not as capitalism or climate change or nationalism or Islam or human greed or nuclear weapons or terrorism or warfare or disease but homosexuality. In the United States, there are churches that bend their most determined efforts to denouncing homosexuals, even – what could be more sanctimoniously revolting? – barracking at the funerals of fallen service personnel on the argument that they died in the name of a country (the US) that tolerates homosexuals. The African churches that remain members of the Anglican communion are leading the movement on that continent to have homosexuality registered in law as an offence punishable by the death penalty. In nations where Sharia law obtains, homosexuals are publicly executed. Even were I not myself gay, I should denounce the world’s religions as barbarous, hypocritical and utterly irrelevant.

I am not much attracted to the post-hippie, self-sufficient, new-age life that anyway touches hands with the pastoral, simple-life version of Christianity and certainly embraces a good deal of superstition and unsustainable swooniness about what is proper. Some of these people, no doubt, will be doing Yule this coming weekend. So I guess the only alternative is to accept that capitalism has won here as everywhere else and accede to the season of conspicuous consumption. “Merry Christmas, you suckers” as the satirical songwriter Paddy Roberts sang nearly half a century ago, “It may be your last”.