A German group has launched a campaign to persuade people to turn their backs on Santa Claus, urging a return to celebrating the works of the original St Nicholas instead. The Santa-Free Zone group has printed thousands of flyers and stickers and is handing them out in towns across Germany, on the understanding that St Nicholas was the No 1 innovator Christmas dude — although, of course, they put it slightly more Germanly than that.
“Santa is a symbol of consumption. He is a symbol of shopping,” the newsreader Peter Hahne explained, while feasting, presumably, on a small, dry biscuit. “He was invented to promote Coca-Cola in 1931. He has nothing to do with St Nicholas, who still teaches us today that giving does not make you poorer, but richer.”
Hahne is something of a star in Germany: a bit like a Teutonic Gavin Esler, if you care to imagine such a thing so close — 12 hours or so — before bed. Hahne’s targets for approbation have, so far, been fairly leftfield — before wanting to eliminate Santa, he zeroed in on “fun” as being a similarly vexatious and morally weakening phenomenon. The publication of his Top Ten book The End of Fun was an appeal to Germans to stop seeking out trivial pursuits, and to re-examine the values that hold society together. Personally, and in direct contradiction to Hahne’s beliefs, I have noticed that it is often only the trivial pursuits that hold a society together in the first place. While the General Synod may be riven and Parliament feuds endlessly on, events down at Mecca bingo continue to tootle along at an age-old and amiable pace.
Still, the small, dry biscuit-eating part of me has a slight understanding of where Hahne is coming from. Having read about St Nicholas, I can see the appeal of rejecting a monolithic global icon — Santa Claus — in favour of a local guy who is the patron saint of pawnbrokers and robbers, resurrected three slaughtered schoolboys whose bodies had been hidden in a pickling barrel, and whose own remains putrefied down into an allegedly healing liquid called “manna”, which was subsequently treasured by the pox-riddled locals. It certainly sorts the midwinter feasting wheat from the midwinter feasting chaff. Johnlewis.com will not e-mail you with “appropriate gifting suggestions” for that event.
But I am pretty pro-Santa. I’m all gung-ho for the fat guy. I would board any putative Santa Wa-hey Express. It’s not hard. As P. Diddy would say — particularly if he’d sealed a particularly lucrative merchandising deal with him — Santa’s the man, really. For anyone with a tu’penny ha’penny interest in peddling any concept of spirituality to feckless minors, Santa is a peerless teaching aid. He allows us to convey the concept of a selfish life ultimately being without reward, to the notoriously unmetaphysical demograph of two-year-olds — and while getting rum truffles and a foot-spa for ourselves, to boot.
Given that before Santa was invented, we used to deport bad children to Australia, or cut their heads off — and have no rum truffles at all — this is all, surely, progress.
Of course, this anti-Santa drive is just part of the now traditional annual fretting over all of Christmas being “too commercialised”. Coming out in support of the Santa-Free Zone campaign, Hermann Bausinger, cultural anthropologist at the University of Tubingen, and presumably Head Mix-Master at Partaaay Central, further complained that “Christmas has switched from being only a celebration within the family and the church, to being a public event, starting late in November and going through to January.”
Perhaps I am nog-addled and tinsel-blind, but that just looks like one gigantic result for the public. Any objection to Christmas being “over-commercialised” ignores the fact that what people are “consuming” is generous presents for their fabulous mums, bin-men and next-door neighbours. In a world pock-marked with wars, unhappiness, stupidity, coldness and death, surely a season of giving should be regarded as a positive thing? It’s not as if Christmas is a month-long celebration of poisoning, sarcasm and making bears dance on hot trays.
And besides, all this fearful denunciation of commercialism slightly overestimates its influence. Peter Hahne’s disapproval of Santa Claus — on the basis that he is a devious appropriation of Christian symbolism on behalf of Coca-Cola — ignores one thing: Coke is one of the few things you never, ever get in a stocking. Or under the tree. Or gift-vouchers for. Coke is not part of Christmas lunch. Coca-Cola’s “invention” of the lovely, generous, moral Santa Claus is actually the most ineffective advertising campaign in history.
Madness in law of consent
Last week’s court case established that a drunken woman’s consent to sex is still a valid consent to sex — making a subsequent, sober accusation of rape now far more difficult to prosecute.
In Dougal vs The Crown, it was established that the alleged victim was too drunk to remember if she’d consented to sex in a corridor or not, while her alleged attacker asserted that she had, in fact, consented.
This does all seem, to use a legal term, extremely mad. If there are two people — one so drunk they subsequently can’t remember anything, and one person who is sober enough to remember — then surely the onus of thoughtful behaviour should rest with the least paralytic person? A new law seems prudent to stop this kind of situation arising again — the criminal offence of “asking for sex with very drunk people”. After all, the law prohibiting sex with 15-year-olds — even if they consent — is predicated on the fact that if someone is deemed, for whatever reason, incapable of correctly judging a situation, the law should step in. And let’s face it, most sober 15-year-olds are a great deal more capable of making a decision about whom to have sex with than someone who’s just consumed the best part of a bottle of rum.
Banishing blues
Last week a report was published claiming that swimming with dolphins can relieve depression. A team from Leicester University took 30 patients with mild to moderate depression to Honduras, and encouraged them to swim with dolphins. While I don’t doubt the validity of the findings, I suspect that if there had been a parallel experiment in which 30 depressed people were flown from Leicester to Honduras, completely ignored the dolphins, and were encouraged to spend two weeks drinking mojitos, wearing cowboy hats and dancing to Don’t Stop Me Now by Queen, they would have had exactly the same result.
