No, I don’t mean the worship of God’s son Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour, the second hypostasis of the Holy Trinity. This is such a minority pastime nowadays that it’s hardly worth mentioning.
Anyone who insists that Christmas is about Christ lives in the distant past, possibly away with the fairies. But that doesn’t mean that this season is free of religious rites.
On the contrary, today’s Britons go their ancestors one better by worshipping, and making sacrifices to, not one god but two: Hermes, the god of trade, and Bacchus, the god of booze.
That’s why shops, off-licences, restaurants and pubs expect to make enough profit in the fourth quarter to remain solvent the whole year. Since their usual Yuletide turnover is some £42 billion, shopkeepers and publicans have always looked forward to Christmas with greedy anticipation.
Yet our Marxist government doesn’t wish to encourage greed. The only thing people are expected to worship is our Marxist government or at a pinch, if they choose to break off just one of its fragments, the NHS.
Any other worship, be it of Christ, Jehovah, Hermes or Bacchus, must be nipped in the bud. The government only makes an exception for Islam, and the same Labour politicians who’d never call Jesus Christ ‘Our Lord’ happily refer to Mohammed as ‘The Prophet’. Even so, they genuflect to their ideology, not Allah.
It’s from the stronghold of that ideology that they set out to uproot the veneration of Hermes and Bacchus at Christmas. Specifically, Starmer and friends are desperately trying to prove Napoleon wrong retrospectively.
They don’t want England to remain a nation of shopkeepers and, consequently, shoppers. They want to put shops, eateries and boozers out of business, what with such establishments being notoriously difficult to nationalise.
And in this undertaking if in no other, the government is succeeding famously. Keir and Rachel have launched a £30 billion tax raid, taking out of people’s pockets roughly three-quarters of the money they used to spend at Christmas.
That by itself would be sufficient to increase the number of boarded-up windows in the High Street. But those blood-sucking retailers were hit from other directions too, just to make sure.
Business rates went up more steeply than ever, and the pinch turned into a tight squeeze. The squeeze became truly strangulating when employers were made to pay much higher National Insurance taxes.
The rise in the minimum wage delivered another debilitating blow, felt much more keenly by small businesses, such as bars and restaurants. They simply can’t afford to pay £25,000 a year to their cleaners and dishwashers. Nor can they afford to hire them in the first place, what with a whole raft of new workers’ rights empowering employees and debilitating employers.
All things considered, Black Friday sales at the end of November, traditionally a cornucopia of shop receipts, proved disastrous (and online sales didn’t fare much better). The same goes for December and, according to all forecasts, January.
It’s not just that people have less money to spend. They also expect things to get worse, not better, which makes them reluctant to spend freely. Britons seldom believe promises of jam tomorrow, but they treat prognoses of doom and gloom with credulity.
These are numerous: anyone with a modicum of economic nous knows that Labour are beggaring the country at the lightning speed one expects from Marxists. We are already paying higher taxes than the French, our borrowing costs keep going up, and our growth is at best stagnant.
Unemployment, especially among the young, is edging upwards, predictably: when employers can’t fire, they are reluctant to hire. The cretinous rush to net zero is driving the cost of energy upwards, which has a knock-on effect on the entire economy.
Mercifully, this hasn’t yet affected Christmas lights, and all our cities are ablaze with these traditional tributes to the season. This has led to an amusing episode involving the Russian government.
Maria Zakharova, spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, went on television telling her brainwashed audience that the absence of Russian gas had plunged all European cities into darkness, with nary a lit Christmas tree anywhere in sight. Mischievous émigrés created and uploaded their own video by superimposing Zakharova’s talking head on the kaleidoscopically changing images of London, Manchester, Vienna, Paris and other cities bathed in Christmas lights.
This is one Christmas tradition inspired by the worship of Christ, not Hermes or Bacchus. Who knows, there may be a silver lining to the cloud of Labour’s economic and social vandalism after all.
Unable to express their festive spirit with charge cards, people may recall what this season is really about. Unlike shops, pubs and restaurants, church services are free and impervious to Marxist depredations – in a marginally free country, that is.
I’m sure Labour vandals would love to do to churches what they’ve done to shops, perhaps by pulling the same economic levers. But they are still not strong enough to do so.
Give them time, but for now they are doing their level best to hit the worship of Hermes and Bacchus where it hurts. Britons are guaranteed to hit back, but they have to wait until 2029 to do so.
They may not do the right thing even then, judging by their random comments on their ruined Christmas. “I’ve voted Labour my whole life,” said one aggrieved gentleman. “But no more: next time I’ll go for the Greens.” More of the same, in other words.
Frailty, thy name is man. Especially one of the Left.
Christmas is a meme that cries out for euthanasia.