It’s almost traditional for bloggers to write at least something about Christmas. And considering that Christmas has been around for a few thousand years, arguably long before Jesus of Nazareth put in an appearance, there’s very little one can say about it that hasn’t been said many times before. However, lack of originality has never been a major stumbling block as far as The Opposite is concerned, so welcome to the Christmas Golb.

As we all know, Christmas was invented by Charles Dickens. Father Christmas (aka Santa Claus) was invented by Coca Cola.

Or at least, that’s what some people think. Yet they can be forgiven this mistake. Dickens undoubtedly did rather well out of his Christmas stories, which continue to sell modestly 138 years after his death. He was also astute enough to include at least one Christmas scene in his other stories too. As for the Coca Cola Corporation, well, hi-jacking Father Christmas was probably one of the best moves they ever made.

Father Christmas before the days of political correctness.

Christmas – or Christ’s Mass – is still celebrated as a religious festival by devout Christians the world over, and far be it from me to pour scorn on their faith. However, it has to be said that, generally speaking, the actual number of devout Christians is dwindling daily, while Christmas itself seems to constantly grow in popularity. I may not be much of a mathematician but this does not appear to add up.

But of course it does add up. Take the religious element out of Christmas and replace it with hedonism and acquisitiveness and you’re on to a winner.

If anyone has a right to celebrate Christmas at all, it must surely be the Retailers. This is the one period in the year when they’re almost guaranteed to make money. Useless plastic knickknacks that nobody even looks at the rest of the year suddenly take on a new life as ‘stocking fillers’. Garages encourage you to take your car in for a Christmas oil-change. Sales of left-handed milk carton openers skyrocket. And if there’s no other way to market your product in a Christmas-related, must-have-before-the-day way, you can always slap a bit of holly on the packaging and hope for the best (take a bow, Christmas orange juice). Even that dusty little shop that sells second-hand surgical prostheses sees its turnover double when someone actually ventures into its grimy depths in search of a genuine 18th century wooden leg with Belgian lace decoration.

The Chippendale wooden leg (without Belgian lace).

And the beauty of Christmas from the Retailer’s point of view is that no one seems to object to a level of indoctrination that would make Josef Goebbels look like a New Age hippie. No sooner is Halloween a none-too-distant memory than the annual Christmas machine lurches into gear and off we go on yet another ill-judged spending spree. Walk into any shop and you can guarantee that Christmas music will be playing. The girls at the checkout wear cute Santa Claus hats. And, of course, there are even people who will quite happily get themselves into very serious debt in order to buy little Harold the latest and greatest X-Playtendo that he simply can’t do without in order to mark the nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Free will? Very little is free at Christmas, will included.

A further great example of Christmas indoctrination is the Christmas Card. The giving and receiving of Christmas cards is an ancient tradition that goes as far back as…well…1843 to be exact. By a strange coincidence, this was three years after the invention of the postage stamp. But being good little Christians, we have completely ignored this quite obvious hand-in-glove relationship between greetings cards manufacturers and the post office. It’s so nice to get cards, we think, and we hope that we will get a few more than we actually sent. We even regard it as a mark of our popularity (or unpopularity). We judge our relationships with others on whether they send us a card or not, irrespective of the fact that card-sending is not an exact science and someone is bound to be left out. And when we get a card, what do we do with it? We read it briefly, comment on what a nice/awful card it is, and the (lack of) nice sentiments expressed in it, put it with all the other cards for the duration of Christmas and then throw it away.

The first ever commercial Christmas card.

In 2005, roughly 1.9 billion cards were sent in the United States alone. I wonder how many trees that accounted for. And that’s just the paper. I have yet to see a card that bears the message “printed with environmentally friendly ink”.

And then we come to the hedonism. Well, the phrase ‘eat drink and be merry’ rather springs to mind. Admittedly, you probably won’t die the next day but you’ll certainly have a financial hangover for a few months. You see, Christmas is a time for stuffing yourself to excess. In many parts of the world, this is a process that starts even before 24 December and finishes well after 1 January. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was a sobering thought that if the Russians were to actually attack us, they would certainly do it on Christmas Day afternoon when the entire Western world lay comatose under the influence of massive amounts of roast turkey. And that’s to say nothing of the drink.

Drinking to excess – and occasionally further than that – is a hallmark of the Christmas season, starting with office parties in mid-December and culminating in the universal joy experienced by all at the fact that the pointer on a clock now shows that we have started a new year (or are getting close to finishing the old one in the Julian calendar). And, in fact, excessive drinking has been part and parcel of celebrations around 25 December a long time before people in the north of Europe stopped dancing around stones and started building churches. Neither is it any accident that Father Christmas and Rudolf have red noses as, in antiquity, Father Christmas at least was synonymous with drunken revelry. Rudolf may simply have had a cold.

The amazing multipurpose electric schnozzle Santa.

I think what I really have against Christmas is that, thanks to rampant commercialism, it’s become incredibly formalised. We decorate the house without really knowing why we are doing it. We send cards because that’s what we’re expected to do. Most of us eat turkey for dinner, even though it has no taste and takes hours to cook. We feel obliged to hold large family gatherings and then succumb to the stress of having to be nice to people we really don’t like. We spend hours tramping around in the cold, putting up with an increasingly aggressive citizenry, in search of gifts for people who already have everything they want. And there’s no way out of it – at least no way that doesn’t mean censure and disapproval.

So, at the end of the day, there is little point in criticising Christmas. Like it or not, we are stuck with it. And it’s only getting bigger. In fact, it’s increasingly attracting the attention of the non-Christian world. Why should we be having all the fun? After all, religion hardly comes into it.

Along with probably the vast majority of British people, I tend to get a bit fed up with our National Anthem.

‘God Save the Queen’ must be one of the best-known national anthems in the world, in much the same way as ‘Tie a yellow ribbon’ is one of the best-known songs. However, in neither case is the fact of being well-known a particular claim to greatness. Ever since early man first learned to whistle, plenty of great tunes have been invented but ‘God Save the Queen’ is simply not one of them. In musical terms it is repetitive and dirge-like. It has none of the panache of the ‘Marseillaise’ , none of the joie de vivre of ‘Il canto degli Italiani’. And that’s before we even start looking at the words.

‘God Save the Queen/King’ is a paean to the monarchy. At a time when the monarchy and the state were virtually indivisible, there was an element of sense in this. God save the Queen/King really meant God Save Us. The line ‘Send her victorious’ had nothing to do with Queen Victoria pulling on a pair of army boots and marching off to the Crimea with a rifle slung over her back but had everything to do with the Thin Red Line, the Charge of the Light Brigade and the Battle of Trafalgar. However, if ‘God Save the Queen’ has any relevance to the British monarchy today, it can only be as a reference to its apparent lack of musical taste.

'Er Majesty. Gawd bless 'er.

Certainly the idea that God is on our side, as expressed in the lines

O Lord, our God, arise,
Scatter her enemies,
And make them fall.
Confound their politics,
Frustrate their knavish tricks,
On Thee our hopes we fix,
God save us all.

went out of favour a long time ago. We might think we have Right on our side, but don’t bring God into it. And, rather disturbingly for a national anthem, we are expected to fix our hopes on divine intervention and not the influence of our ruler. That’s the only bit of modern relevance in the song.
So, all in all, is it any wonder that when the English football team lines up at Wembley, they sing the national anthem with something less than enthusiasm? Not only is it dirge-like and irrelevant, it isn’t even the English national anthem. Because the English, unlike the Scots and the Welsh, simply don’t have one. We have to make do with ‘God Save’, which is the British national anthem. Perhaps it should be ‘God help us’.

Queen Victoria in civilian dress.

There have been various attempts to replace ‘God Save’ with something more appropriate to the English. In cricket they now use ‘Jerusalem’, which is a stirring enough song, although still pretty slow. And its popularity as a national song is very strange indeed when you consider that William Blake’s poem was supposed to contrast the ‘idyllic’ England of two thousand years ago with the country of ‘dark satanic mills’ that he himself was familiar with. ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ is a better candidate although ‘wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set’ sounds disturbingly like a call for expansionism.

And there we have one of the problems with all three songs. They were written in the 18th and 19th centuries and reflect the preoccupations of those times. They are also written in a language that few people today understand, even if they make the effort.

So, may I make a modest proposal? There is a song that was first written down, in an earlier version, of course, in about 1720. Which means that it probably pre-dates ‘God Save’ by about 25 years. It is widely known throughout the world and has, in fact, been translated into several languages. In spite of the fact that many people regard it as American in origin it is actually as English as roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.

I speak of none other than ‘Old MacDonald had a farm’.

At a time in the history of this planet when fewer and fewer people have faith in the ability of our rulers to make the right decisions and where their arrogance and pomposity become more apparent each day, what song could be more appropriate to state occasions than ‘Old MacDonald’? Can you imagine Mr. Gordon Brown stepping down from his plane onto the red carpet to the strains of ‘…with a quack quack here and a quack quack there…’? Or the British rowing team stepping onto the podium to be awarded the gold at the next Olympic games to ‘…here a moo, there a moo, everywhere a moo moo’? And, of course, not to mention the massed faithful at Wembley belting out ‘E I E I O!!!!!!’

I think we’re onto a winner here. Notice that it’s OLD MacDonald, which creates a nice link to history and traditional values. MacDonald is a name that, although Scottish in origin – like our present Prime Minister – is commonly found throughout the British Isles. And there’s the splendid link to agriculture, on which our wealth was originally based.

A duck

Okay, I know it sounds as if I’m promoting Old MacDonald Had a Farm as the BRITISH national anthem rather than the English one. I admit I’m getting carried away on this point. Let’s settle for England. And it would be a great song for sporting occasions in particular as it combines national pride and ridiculing the enemy in one song. Let’s see some Brazilian superstar try to runs rings around the England defence to the strains of ‘with an oink oink here…’

E I E I O. Come on England!

And the beauty of it is…that it comes ready translated into Japanese:

いちろうさんの　牧場で イーアイ　イーアイ　オー
おや　ないてるのは　ひよこ イーアイ　イーアイ　オー
あら　チッチッチッ　ほら　チッチッチッ あっちもこっちも　どこでもチッチッ チッチッチッ　ほら　チッチッチッ あっちもこっちも　どこでもチッチッ
いちろうさんの　牧場で イーアイ　イーアイ　オー