What is there to celebrate ?

In olden days, what people celebrated at Christmas, New Year, Thanksgiving, was their survival. For most of the population the feasts of Christmas Eve and the Eve of St Sylvester were the only time of the year that they had meat, the pig - fed on the plentiful acorns of the oak forests - having been killed at the beginning of December, and every part used "except the squeal".

In remote parts of France, where there was no wheat or even rye flour, they baked a whole huge loaf of chestnut-flour at Christmas, and ate it throughout the year, dunked in thin soup or acidic wine.  This was their staple, and its communal baking was a special event at a special time.  They were surviving.  Chestnut bread is much more nourishing than wheat bread (which is nearly as toxic as sugar), but rather hard to digest.  The rest of the vitamin intake came from turnips, rutabagas, leeks and wild food such as nettles.  Even today, people can be seen scouring the woods for insipid fungi, and the roadsides for edible herbs from bryony to wild asparagus and fennel.

Now, of course,all has changed.  The remote parts of France have, like everywhere in the parts of the world run by pinkish-grays, become obscenely rich.  The old feasts have become meaningless, retained like the living dead by the necromantic necrophilia of Commerce.  All that can now be celebrated is Trade.  Adam Smith's "Nation of Shopkeepers" has become the planet of shopkeepers, willing to use any ploy to increase profit.  Since we live in luxury unimagined by Roman Emperors, we celebrate in like fashion : jadedly, neurotically or maniacally.  And we haven't the cultural wherewithal even to have orgies.  Christianity and Islam killed them a long time ago, and the orgiastic in our brains has simply been converted to greed.

What would Jesus have done at Christmas ?  He would have begged to be crucified.  Or at least smothered by another "towel-head".

Or he would have drunk hemlock from the roadside.