Bans on festive markets and vegans up in arms about pigs in blankets jokes mean I’m dreaming of a woke free Christmas
IF Charles Dickens rewrote A Christmas Carol today, Scrooge would start out full of the joys of the season and end up as a cranky killjoy.
In my book Welcome To The Woke Trials, I wrote: “Woke is the revenge of the dullard on the wit, and the wallflower on the whirling dancer.”
Add to that “the revenge of the moaners on the merrymakers” and you’ve got the Woke Christmas in a carbon-neutral nutshell.
What bigger and better parade for party-poopers to rain on than the December revelries which unite believer and heathen alike in providing an oasis of (flashing) lights in the middle of a whopping one-third of a year of darkness?
Think of the jolly old song The Twelve Days Of Christmas.
Now let’s bring it up to date: “On the first day of Christmas, my true love sent to me — a National Trust calendar which leaves out the Christian festivals of Easter and Christmas while including the festivals of other faiths!”
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In the interests of completing one’s Bulls**t Bingo card, the calendar describes itself as being concerned with “inclusivity and wellbeing” — but not so inclusive that it bothers noting key dates that are important to Christian wellbeing.
And so the dozen days pile up — but nothing jolly like gold rings and lords a-leaping are to be found here.
Instead we have animal lovers up in arms over a Sainsbury’s Christmas card which shows chilly pigs excited to be getting blankets, describing it as the “saddest, unkindest Xmas card I’ve ever seen”.
I’m a vegetarian myself, but this is blatant offence-seeking.
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While we’re disapproving of pigs in blankets, let’s be sure not to make any humorous reference to that other seasonal savoury, Devils on Horseback — it’s unfair to horses.
Or Satanists. Or something.
Bare breasts and beer-pong
We have the London School of Economics decreeing that the Christmas holidays are forthwith to be known as “the winter break”, as the Easter holidays have been renamed “the spring break”.
(I’m actually quite amused by the latter, with its connotations of a fortnight of bare breasts and beer-pong in Mexican resort hotels, which I’m sure the strait-laced buzzkills of the LSE aren’t aware of.)
Apparently, the authorities believe that the new names will be more “widely recognised” among their student body.
Frankly, if people don’t know when Christmas is, they should be in pre-school, not further education.
We have a museum in Durham cancelling the word Christmas from its seasonal market and rebranding it as a “Winter Market” — which caused the Antiques Road Trip expert David Harper to comment: “What’s next?
"Are we going to cancel Santa, the reindeer, children wearing Christmas hats?
“Essentially, all you’ll be left with is a Wednesday market. This won’t stop until we stop it.”
After running a poll on his X/Twitter account asking what the Bowes Museum should call the market instead, “Humbug Market” won out.
But I’m sure it won’t be long before humbugs are banned too, as they are made out of sugar and might conceivably give someone a brief moment of pleasure — which would never do.
At least the Durham market is carrying on under another, less culturally inflammatory name than “Christmas” — but Oxford’s oldest one was nearly forced to close all together this year after the local council insisted their net-zero goals were more important.
Nicole Rahimi had run the event for more than a decade but said this had become “impossible” due to Oxfordshire County Council prioritising a cycle lane, thereby raising fears of high-speed collisions between rabid cyclists and the thousands of visitors to the market who would not be aware that a two-wheeled highway to hell now bisects the city centre where once the market stood.
The totally unnecessary purchase of food, drink and Christmas decorations must naturally come second to the right of a bunch of self-righteous pests to show off their £10,000 bikes.
And Ms Rahimi — who has now stepped down and been replaced by new organisers — was obviously being totally unreasonable when she complained to the Oxford Mail about the council: “They are prioritising cycling and their net-zero ambitions over the 60 businesses that come here each year; I cannot accept the conditions.”
Ms Rahimi added that she believed most cyclists would be “happy” for the lane to be closed for three weeks.
Happy? How dare they? What is this — the season to be jolly or something?
Let’s not forget that poisonous plant mistletoe, surely a weapon of toxic masculinity — ban it!
Saucy celebration of gender-bending
And I can’t help wondering what the traditional EastEnders family quarrel at the Queen Vic this year will be about.
The way the soaps are going, it’s more likely to be misgendering rather than good old-fashioned adultery.
Personally, I’m looking forward to a quiet, old-fashioned Christmas with my husband — booze for breakfast, a quick but savage squabble before lunch and making up in front of a classic Top Of The Pops from the past when the line, “Not sure if you’re a boy or a girl” was a prompt for a saucy celebration of gender-bending rather than a scolding about pronouns.
Christmas can survive many things — war, the cost-of-living crisis and Matt Cardle having the Christmas No1 single.
But can it survive Wokeism, with its unique ability to turn a party into a wake?
At least when the Puritan Parliament abolished Christmas Day as a feasting free-for-all holiday in 1647 they did it with zeal, no matter how misguided.
Modern Woke crimes against Christmas are invariably carried out in a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger mode, a drip-effect of dismay and denunciation — even if the end result is like a bucket of cold water on some cheery carol singers’ heads.
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How wholeheartedly our Hindu and Sikh compatriots marked Diwali last month — we need to learn from them how to unashamedly celebrate our native culture.
Or risk living in some nightmare Narnia of a cold, cold country where it is always winter and never Christmas.