Because we said so! That’s why!

I

am

a lie.

This is

not at all

what Christmas

trees look like! I don’t

understand

how this happened

at all! How did we collectively

decide to lie to our children about how Christmas

trees look.

It is really
strange! This tree

is a lie! Forget Father

Christmas! That is fucking

kids stuff compared to the depth of this

lie. Christmas tree branches go upwards as

they come out. Not down. If they went down, the

decorations would just fall off. How did this happen?

This bit is brown.

That is not a lie.

This bit is really

actually brown.

The truth finds

a home here.

And in a way, that’s what I like about Christmas. As bizarre an idea as I find it that somehow we as a people have collectively decided to draw this tree upside down, and that this is utterly unquestioned, that is basically a microcosm for the true meaning of Christmas itself. We all, somehow, by an untraceable trajectory, decided that Christmas would be meaningful.

And it worked.

For the most part.

I am fully aware that Christmas is consumerist and ridiculous and shops up their prices to make extra money. I know what Christmas started off as, and it’s origins and a whole load of stuff that’s completely interesting, but utterly irrelevant. Jesus was born in April or something and the celebration was moved to December to compete with some other holiday celebration blah blah blah. Father Christmas’s image as we know it was designed by a man named Hayden Sunbloom in 1931 when he was commissioned by Coca Cola to do a portrait of Sinterklaas blah blah blah and in describing Mary the original Hebru text uses the word “alma”, which means “a young woman of marriageable age”, not the word “bethela”, which means “virgin” blah blah blah.

That being said. Who gives a shit.

These things are all correct. In the same way that that guy you know who’s obsessed with zombie films is correct when he says “actually they’re all allegorical. They were written to be metaphors for consumerism and communism and blah blah blah” and while yes, he is technically correct, everybody still hates him because that’s not what they’re about anymore.

They’re not metaphors for  capitalism or the spread of ideas anymore, they’re metaphors for metaphors. Metaphors that keep coming, they just keep coming at you, long after they’ve stopped being meaningful or interesting. They are figures of speech that have become predatory, long after their meaning as figures of speech has left the stage.

Christmas is the same. It’s not secular OR religious. It’s not consumerist OR about purity and giving. It’s a compound of shitting everything, just like all the best things are.

The true meaning of Christmas is that we have given it a meaning. The meaning might be being grumpy and complaining for a few weeks for all I care, it is still there. We have, by some convolution, decided that it is meaningful and in doing so have given it meaning.

I like Christmas for the same reason I like that we draw our Christmas trees upside down. Because it shows us that we are not a product of out environment. The meaning didn’t come from anywhere. We created it. And it worked. We get together and we have fun, or we sit with our families. We laugh about the stupid shit we did this year or we get depressed because nothing happened the way it was supposed to. We do whatever the shit we like to do on Christmas and we do it for ourselves, and that’s a more powerful idea than any kind of tradition.

So why is the lie of Christmas still brilliant?

BECAUSE WE FUCKING SAID SO THAT’S WHY!

~ by Sandy Nicholson on December 11, 2010.