Last year I reviewed Christmas stuff but had to leave out a lot, because the MSM, as usual, couldn’t handle my truth-saying. So, once again, here is my assessment of Christmas things before Big Brother (my editor) stops me from waking you all up.
Santy
Check out Father Christmas, with his staff of mistletoe and his long flowing robe and long beard, and behold the lushly bearded Santa Claus, in his snugly fitted, Coke-shilling velvet suit. These guys are basically an Englishman and a Yank. They’re nothing compared with Santy, who is from Athlone and smokes rollies. Santy is best met in a failing shopping centre in the midlands in the early 1980s. He has a red anorak, a felt bobble hat, a wad of cotton wool glued to his face and sadness in his eyes. In his own way he is magical. It’s unclear if Santy had the official endorsement of the supermarket in which he operated, but he certainly remained one step ahead of security at all times.
Selection boxes
Featuring all six food groups: nom, nom, nom, nom, nom and nom. Best eaten before breakfast on Christmas morning. Downside: watching other children with superior impulse control slowly savour each square of chocolate hours and days after you ate yours in minutes, like Cookie Monster or locusts.
Winter solstice
We have a lot on our plates at this time of year, what with the logistics of cooking for the extended family, making sure everyone has the gifts they desire, finishing last-minute work projects and, of course, fretting that a huge dragon has eaten the sun and that we will all dwell evermore in darkness. Picture it: you sit anxiously in your beautiful kitchen in Newgrange, your home, quaffing sweet ale and wrapping presents while weeping because the sun god Lugh now dwells in the belly of a great wyrm and will no more illuminate your inner chambers. So busy! There are cards to write and turkeys to baste – and, also, there’s the prospect of endless night thanks to the giant serpent that consumed the solar orb, the giver of life. Anyway, fearing that a prehistoric lizard has eaten our heat source* is the true meaning of Christmas, and don’t let the woke mob tell you otherwise. (*May bear no relation to Celtic mythology about the solstice.)
On Beast Games, MrBeast gives away islands. This will be familiar to the Irish as ‘colonialism’
Meghan Markle’s lifestyle tips, plus other TV for your glazed-but-happy eyes in 2025: ‘One must be firm with one’s butler’
Culchiecore, bonkbusters, murder, more murder and Nationwide: What I’ve seen on TV in 2024
Letters to the Editor, December 14th: On the Green effect, grief and the humble Brussels sprout
Xmas
Religious festival celebrating the birth of our lord, Wolverine. Fans of the Chrises Hemsworth, Evans and Pratt prefer “Chrismas”.
Holly
The best and oldest of Christmas decorations. It would never get beyond the prototype stage nowadays thanks to health-and-safety legislation and children who demand more from life than having plants indoors. Here’s my elevator pitch for “holly”: “Holly is a spiky plant that hurts the hands and has berries that are poisonous to dull, slack-jawed children; if you hate life, you’ll tolerate holly!” That’s the best I can do. Holly’s not even trying to be likable. Therefore, I am deeply impressed at how Big Holly convinced us that holly was indispensable to the Christmas season. The long-gone yuletide marketing experts who convinced us to embrace holly as a “fun” plant deserve our undying respect. I think they also worked on Fianna Fáil’s recent election campaign.
Brussels sprouts
So called, presumably, because these socialist sprouts have been foisted on us by unelected Eurocrats. I can’t otherwise understand why these brazen stunted cabbages are still with us, lowering the whole tone of Christmas dinner with their incessant bullshit. We’re in the midst of the Anthropocene, watching all sorts of majestic species disappear, and this little fucker still thrives? I’m not having it. Nowadays Brussels sprouts are frequently drowned in bacon and butter by chefs in denial about the fact that they’ve found not so much a workable Brussels-sprouts recipe as an unusual place to store bacon and butter.
Annuals
As a child one of my favourite things about Christmas was getting hardback albums of my favourite British comics. These were named after archaic Victorian exclamations (Whoopee!/Cor!!) or old-time stereotypes (Buster/Dandy) or they were strangely blase and culturally insensitive about war (Warlord/Victor). Nowadays children get to play immersive games in which they murder digital people and own sentient Furbies they can control with their minds. But I am a man from the olden days, so when I see the technological marvels available to the children of the 21st century I shiver with fear, say “lawks!” or “blimey!” and hope for a slap-up feed.
Illuminated houses
A bit of tinsel on a scraggily white plastic tree was once enough to show deference to the season or at least give you some cover from being declared “no craic” by your bullies. This is no longer enough. It’s now important to ensure that nobody on your street gets any sleep because you have constructed a blindingly bright diorama that involves snowmen, elves, reindeer and Santa and has all the production values of a mid-ranking Marvel film. Congratulations: your house can now be seen from space, is putting huge pressure on the national grid and comes with a not-insignificant risk that a small plane might land on top of it. “Happy Christmas and F**k the Environment!” these illuminated homes declare, and everyone claps with joy even though when I produced cards that said the same thing they didn’t sell well at all.
Christmas crackers
What if Christmas presents were crap, tiny, combative and loud? These are the questions asked by visionary genius John “Christmas” Cracker, the man who invented the Christmas cracker, probably. He decided that it would be good if, to celebrate Christ’s birth, two siblings could wrangle over the ownership of a small festive cylinder until the cylinder exploded, shedding plastic tat across the table and the floor for toddlers and pets to eat and me to stand on in my bare feet.
[ ‘Trust me, I’m a family Christmas expert and these are the rules to live by’Opens in new window ]
Christmas pudding
Christmas pudding is here to remind us, amid the seasonal plenty, that we once lived in a time of scarcity when our autumnal surplus needed to be preserved with alcohol and turned into a rich, bitter sludgepile. This was considered to be good enough for us, thanks to shame and the Catholic Church. We don’t like being reminded of this, so nowadays we ritualistically set Christmas puddings on fire. Only my father gnaws on the charred remains, for he still follows the old ways.
Mariah Carey
An ancient being who has, since time immemorial, announced the beginning of the yuletide season by yodelling her hit single All I Want for Christmas Is You. This is a song that begins with the claim “I don’t want a lot for Christmas” but goes on to demand a full human, the listener, as a gift. It’s classic Carey, really. What a diva! But listen to her sensual warblings: who would begrudge her this luxury in these straitened times?
