Cherry’s Christmas
I am the Ghost of Christmas Past.
What? You’re the ghost of what? Do I look like some grouchy old Victorian man (hope I have those adjectives in the right order) that needs to be shown his place in the Universe? You gonna show me the time at Disney World when all the parks were full & we couldn’t get into any of them even though we had 5-day Park Hopper passes? The time Dad threw the Christmas tree out the front door?
I am the Zombie of Christmas Present. Get out of my way! I must consume more, or the economy will collapse, making Rich People uncomfortable! The Horror!
Why Cherry is Nasty
The thing is, having comics that were dirty, depicting explicit sex, made them “dangerous”, made them contraband, even though we were allowed to do them that way, Freedom of Speech & all. They weren’t just Fuck Books, they were comics that happened to have depictions of sex acts in them. It was having Fun as an Act of Rebellion. Reaction against it revealed the hypocrisy of the Society of Western Civilization, which we would then mock in dirty comics.
The Christmas War
There is no war on Christmas, it’s Christmas that has been waging war on the Midwinter Seasonal Celebration, in Northern Europe it’s called Yule, that’s where the trees & holly & snowmen & gift giving & Santa Claus come from. Around there, Winter is a thing that everyone has to prepare for, live through, & stay as cheerful as possible by getting together & partying when you’re half way through it. That’s where all the Peace On Earth Good Will Toward Men came from, men here of course being used generically. The Solstice is the actual midpoint of Winter but it’s not observed as being at this one particular time when a switch is thrown; these people didn’t have calendars, they did not think of the year as being divided up into discrete increments, it was that time in the cycle of the Earth’s revolution around the Sun, although they didn’t think of it that way, when days stopped getting shorter & night got as long & dark as it was going to get, & the change was not noticeable from day to day. The countdown to the new year is an industrial way of perceiving the passage of time. In the tropics none of this means shit, there is no Winter. Bethlehem is not in the tropics, but neither is it in the snowy woods, so evergreen trees & snowmen & sleigh bells are not really appropriate motifs for the celebration of the birth of our alleged Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth.
So Pope Gregory XIII, as he was rebooting the Julian calendar, decided to throw Christmas into the middle of this annual celebration that had been going on for thousands of years that included the Pagans celebrating the Solstice; the Christians had been running around building churches on top of Pagan temples, so this was just more of that. The Christians hijacked the whole season, claiming it as their own. Cultural appropriation. Jesus Christ is not the reason for the season. It never was.