Christmas: It’s a truly revolting spectacle
A very interesting disease called ‘Christmas Fever’ appears to have struck the people of my hometown Melbourne, and signs of it spreading have me worrying terribly.
The symptoms, if mien startled eyes are to believed, involve parking in the streets to your nearest megamall with scant regard to the locals, blowing wads of cash on an archaic industry that actively supports consumerism and the destruction of natural resources, and eventually teetering home covered in a fine spray of food court chinese food and BO. If pain persists, shoot yourself.
That’s right, it’s come time again for Jeff and Terry to throw pillows into red and white suits to scare nearby small children into hysterical shrieks; for a stream of casual shop assistants to fly into Chadstone for 24 hours of bewildered cash registry, and for Jennifer Hawkins to be photographed in a variety of stagey, awkward leaning poses in front of the Myer Christmas windows. It’s Christmas shopping! Isn’t it so precious and dizzying you could eat it up with a long-stemmed gilt-tipped spoon?
I have a history of Christmas in my family. The women on my father’s side are celebrated gift wrappers. I remember as a child spending long evenings out at Northland and Highpoint, eating vanilla tarts in the mildly uncomfortable heat, smelling the stale Coke and the wet tiles and the steamy fear emanating from the proppy, trussed-up breasts. It was a family ritual and I was wholly accustomed to it. Unlike most fellow Melbourians, however, I eventually grew up and saw the retail industry for what it is: a crock.
Why do we fall for it again, every year? we do we continue to play out this tireless pantomime celebrating cashed-up bogans and obscene cruelty? Why do we watch from the sidelines, waving our receipts and ignoring the tawdry debauchery on display, pretending we’re simply sophisticated Gatsby types celebrating a gay affair?
Christmas is truly revolting spectacle. No amount of milk and cookies or idiotic, ugly headwear, or boorish television reports thinking they’re the first person ever to crack wise about the latest series of accidents on our highways can hide the fact that we’re all party to a garish traditions it’s time to put out to pasture. The lavish waste of money, the burnt overheated idiot women toping over each other outside the shops on Boxing Day morning, undignified heaps at the supercentres, the natty prats in matching Santa suits blearily waving cans of Bundy about at the fun run. It’s nauseating.
Richael Mankin, a punter who will be attending his 64th consecutive Xmas, recently gave a sweeping appraisal of the event in one of the local broadsheets, staying fondly: “At the end of the day they’re all still sitting there amongst the wrapping paper and empty boxes, the girls either admiring their latest toys or looking to return them as soon as possible.” Perhaps Richael’s idea of a good time differs from yours and mine but still, he has toasted the worst elements of human behaviour with one simple, slightly poetic sentence. At the end of the day we’re all still there amongst the wrapping paper and empty boxes. Because we are the fool.
Obviously it’s not all about fashion and drinking and being felt up in the living room by a pawing, red-faced relative, of course not. For these giddying, media-saturated weeks it’s also about the kids. Remember them? The Angus’ Endrew Addy clearly does, penning today a semi-pornographic ode to his daughter that read in part:
With an abnormally attractive head and a stream of long black hair swishing across his forehead, her portrait is surely the lady that Louisa May Alcott had in mind when she penned her fictional Little Women. Her neck is long, wide and powerful, and her chassis is long and perfect.
Whether Endrew was actually physically aroused whilst writing this moise prose is anybody’s guess, but the fact remains he’s turned the focus to something we should all be considering amongst the human detritus the holiday scatters in it’s wake: our children friends.
Section 9 of Victoria’s Prevention of Cruelty to Children Act states that “a person who overworks, abuses, beats, torments or terrifies a child; commits an act of cruelty”. Personally I can think of nothing finer than being raised to demand gifts repeatedly while morons scream at me to buy and an insecure chump with short-man syndrome sits on my back pushing me around in a pram, but then I am faily kinky and broadminded. The children, I fear, may not appreciate the Xmas tradition so much, what will all the waste disposal and nose bleeding and mobbish, terrifying photographers and “Santa’s helpers” jostling them into submission.
But perhaps I’m being too harsh. Perhaps I’d think more kindly of the holiday season if it set itself up as a more sustainable industry. Perhaps they could utilise the 70 per cent of children brought up with Christmas that end up howling tears of misery when they don’t get what they have asked for and turn those tears into adorable little aperitifs and sauce bases to be served around the table for Christmas lunch. I mean, these people love children to bits. Why not shove a few tasty morsels into their lipsticked jogs between entree and main courses?
Listen: the only difference between Christmas and the rightly maligned practice of Halloween is that on December 25 you can’t see the children’s hopes and desires dying directly in front of your eyes (they save that for Boxing Day). At least the only dumb animals whipped on Halloween were the Australian cricket team by Sri Lanka, and they’re not to know any better.
So enjoy Christmas, it’s jingling bells, its absurd homage to excess and over-indulgement and use of consumerism as a form of entertainment. I’m saying well clear. I don’t encourage you to do the same however, otherwise I’ll have to use my mind to create something that makes me more than a third rate Catherine Deveny.
