CHRISTMAS EVE CAN KILL YOU.

 What can we  say about it all?
 For most, it is but an inevitably disappointing affirmation of their shackling to consumerisme nouvelle totalitarienne, of their families' lives and appetites and futures being determined  by the servants of a handful of wicked, greedy bastards - those who have and continue to steal everything by any means up to and including holocaustal war on civilian populations.  

A Christian at prayer.

Deck the whore with boughs of money

Tra-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la

Some will, tonight and tomorrow,  sing Gaudete, Christus est natus, as they worship the long-prophesied Christ-child, the virgin birth,  the rescinding of Adam's  original sin and the hope of redemption and resurrection.
  Much smarter people than I believe in this miracle so, unlike the Reverend Dawkins, his own priest, in his own church, I can say but  Amen - let it be so.

For most, however,  in the countries of active or culturally-entrenched Christianity, their even  notional faith is turned upon them,  their purses and wallets;  Christmas, as ever,  will be  a desperate, indebting and frustrating nonsense, sitting in a bath of WTF-ism;  the unnecessary  feast vastly over-rated, ill-digested, troublesome and not worth the fuss and expense, it is not as though we starve throughout the year, or even, as we should, throughout Advent.  Selling a stuff-yourself-til-you-puke feast to an already overweight, fasting-averse population  is a triumph of GodlessHeathenBastard mind-control advertising.

None, though,  no mere wife or common-law hussy,  however fierceley they are scourged, will ever recreate Nigella's simply yummy Xmas Fayre.

A kitchen scrubber

First, send the servants out for several heaped teaspoons of cocaine, I find that Colombian is the best, although, sometimes, anything will do.  If you can't find coke, don't be afraid to use weed, lots and lots of it, marijuana's just simply one of those things you can never have too much of. 
 What?  Yes, in your cooking. 
Although I find I can smoke it, well, all the time,
in one of those clever bong things;  
your dealer will let you have one.

or Tom's

 

 The real pub landlord, a stupid ignorant  fat fuck.

Ooh, arrr, viewers, just you follow them scrumptious recipes of moine'n you'll all be as elfy as worrIyam. What I love is that you can take two kilos of lard, two kilos of butter, two kilos of brown sugar, two kilos of caster sugar and a great big scrumptious two kilos of honey, mix it all togevver wiv some really scrumptious chocolate  and you've got a really helfy Christnmas snack for the liddle 'uns. S'worritsallabout4me,keepin' me family helfy.

or Jamie's perfect, healthy cuisine, 

 

for it doesn't exist, it is a televisual confection, filmed over and over, in September, until it looks right, then lit and orchestrated and arranged and styled, its creators, probably off their faces on coke or booze, tasting but a teaspoonful and pronouncing it simply Ambrosian. 

Without endless supplies of labour, materials and an entire production team, poor Mum's turkey, cooked in a tiny, inefficient, dirty oven will probably taste like shit, turkey does, anyway, no matter what you shove up its sundered arse.  And anybody aping BoyJamie's approach to food-handling will probably have a merry, diarrhoeic New Year, the dirty fucker; Christ, if he'd ever worked in a decent hotel he'd have had his arse kicked all around the range; dirty, dirty, dirty man. Why has his producer never said to him, look, Maestro, kicking  oven doors closed with your street shoes, they could have anything on them, dogshit, sperm, snot, spit, not to mention that they are, anyway, filthy, stinky sweaty trainers, not really shoes at all, just bitsa fucking filth, sold to you by criminals like Nike and you know, Chef, they can be transferred, all those germs on and in your shoes,  by hand, by teatowel or oven glove, and, as for wiping your hands on your trousers, and then sticking your fingers in dish after dish, without washing them in-between, well, y'know, even these bloated little bastard kids that you'er trying to educate,  the ones that're gonna die at forty from exploding livers, gonna be so fucking fat they'll need to be winched in and outa bed, whose teeth are all gonna fall out and there's not enough fucking dentists, anyway, to fix the fat bastards up with false ones, and even if they were the bloated fucking mutants wooden be employable and wooden have no fucking money to pay a fucking dentist even  if there was one, which there won't be, but even them, the bloated, blubbery stupid ones with the tooth decay and the failing kidneys, even  they would know that putting your shitty shoes near their grub, and sticking your bacteria-infested mitts in everything you see  and then in your gob and then over the arse of your trousers is like, y'know, bad shit, man?  

All I wanna do is use my fame to make more money, I mean, save the national diet, yeah, from the supermarkets poisoning everybody. Only not Sainsburys.

I should think that what with his vile spices  and his utterly filthy kitchen habits,  Jamie Oliver is single-handedly responsible for the national epidemic of what we call irritable bowel syndrome, has given any who follow his recipes and his filthiness an incurable case of the shits. And, God bless his greedy little piggy head, he simply can't give up, he has  made maybe a hundred million pounds from his filthy, greasy, finger-licking food  bollocks;  he could afford an education, to relax, travel the world, but being in  salmonella showbusiness he must endlesly renew his dire, greasy, infected  cheeky chappy, currently he is a dietician, gonna make the nation better; 
right, son, first go and wash your fucking hands you cheeky cunt, and invest in a box of latex gloves, like I do.

  The family visits will be a festival of strained madness and simmering rage.  Even here, in ishmaelia, a realm largely without family relationships, Christmas spurs contact. I have just received a fucking Dear Uncle  email from a distant nephew, although all of mine are distant, some of them I've never even seen, nor want to, fuck me, being related to their mother was punishment enough for one lifetime.  I haven't seen her in forty years and being much older than me, I expect her to be dead from drink and fags and depression and I live in fear of a horde of nieces and nephews arriving whom I have never seen, 
expecting me, somehow, to care for them, bequeath them stuff.  It's times like these that I wish I had Rottweilers, instead of Harris.  


I'd love to be able to say to somebody Get off my property, Sir or I'll set the dogs on you.  Harris, however, is not up to controlled savagery.

 Even the fucking television will be an insult, its owners and managers holidaying in the Bahamas, a skeleton staff broadcasting ancient fucking rubbish that the viewers have paid to see several times over, indeed, their parents have paid several times to see it, before they were born, and,  having shopped their fucking fingers off buying plastic and silicon shit for the  little LuvEm2Bits,Me  sugar-maddened, attention-deficit, pornography-saturated, consumer-crazed  lunatic kids

Some, of course,  suffering from Otherness, will be  stumbling ragged by the road, Plenty's one-point-six diesel, with lowest-ever carbon emission, whooshing past, on a mission of goodwill to all men, just not the ragged ones;keen to give unto those who have, avoiding like the plague those who have not.  Some will be bereaved, revisiting,  enduring all their joint yesterdays alone, maybe alone for ever, now, sick, faltering,  GlabaCorp's cruelly  ubiquitous enforced bogus jollity, a relentless, rusty blade, prodding at their heart's wound, twisting.  Many, many are estranged, separated, irreconcilable, alienated, maybe hospitalised, incarcerated, squatting, trying to find a place to kip in our citizen-hostile cities, forever anxious, pulling Life's cheap cracker alone, with both hands.

But, hey, Fuck the Others, no reason to put our Christmas  on hold.  They should just get a life.

And that is  the way of it, such empathy  as we are able to feel for others, such as remains, after govament has trashed the homeless as villainous, lazy and unworthy; the old as selfish and greedy for not surrendering their property to the young;  the sick and infirm as workshy chancers, living off the rest of us, bone idle.  And so we leave it the professional carers  and the cynical,  showy regiments of tin-rattling  care,

The national conscience, sub-contracted.

 maybe bunging them  a few pounds; for to pry, too deeply, into state-sponsored Sorrow, well, we might have to do something about it.

I have no answers and, overwhelmed, as I am sure everyone must be by this yearly atrocity, this remorsless bombardment, this wasteland where footfall in the wretched shopping malls is the index of our national value, the purchase of worthless tat our very own act of deliverance, our  unavoidable disappointment a price worth paying,
I'm sorry to mention it.

Those parts of the pagan MidWinter festival not colonised by Greed, those  unmolested Christian essences of fellowship and neighbourliness, those gifts of Creation - life, light, hope, purpose and art's magic, I wish to all here, with thanks for your goodwill.

We wish you merry Christmas and a happy new year. 

Christmas Evensong Blues
Babe, I'm broke and I got no place to go.

This is from Sorrow's anthology. Not, as Gillian Wlash says, by Doc Watson but originally a gift to us from the angelic Mississippi John Hurt,  a man whose music, much imitated, steeped in slavery and share-cropping, was somehow bathed in delight and mischief. 
I have been listening to Hurt all my life and he always makes me smile.

This arrangement, by Dave Rawlings, for  his magical 1935 parlour guitar  and his partner, Gillian,  is the finest re-working of this song that there could ever be, bluesy, pretty, melancholy and dusted with Heaven's dissonant reminders.