Woke Christmas

“For God’s sake – we can’t even go to our kids’ nativity plays these days without having wokeness shoved down our throats,” bellowed professionally controversial writer Jeremiah Clackson in a recent column for the Sunday Excess. “It’s all bloody inclusiveness and namby pamby liberalism – I went to one recently and the three shepherds were all played by girls and the three wise men were all of different ethnicities! Since when did we have Chinese wise men? Where’s that in the bloody Bible, eh?” The column has raised a number of questions and a furious response from liberal commentators, with many pointing out that, as Clackson has no children of school age, just why was he hanging around primary schools watching their nativity plays? “Just what is ‘woke’ anyway?” demanded Dr Harold Bleck, senior lecturer in cultural studies at the New Forest Academy of Tree Surgery. “It’s a totally amorphous term, generally used by right wing political and media figures to denote anything that tells them that they can’t be, well, to put it bluntly, arseholes.” This, the academic argues, means that it extends to encompass anything that promotes the values of general human decency, characterising them as being somehow undesirable. “If you follow such broad ‘guidelines’, I suppose that plays depicting the Nativity – the birth of the Christian Messiah who grows up to espouse a creed of love that rejects materialism and promotes tolerance – will always be woke,” he muses. “To them, it will be just so much left-wing propaganda.”

Indeed, some on the right have questioned traditional depictions of the nativity, asking whether it does truly reflect the meaning of those who originally composed the testaments. “You have to ask, just what are those Three Kings about, eh?” declares Simon Shatley-Lemon, convicted football hooligan, fraudster and leading extreme right agitator. “They altruistically bring presents to the child of some itinerant bastards so poor that they can’t even afford a room at the Inn – typical bloody grifters, always expecting to get something for nothing. They probably arrived in Bethlehem on a boat!” He also takes issue with other aspects of the nativity, as usually depicted. “Not to mention that those Wise Men are often depicted as white – but the woke bastards ‘take the knee’ in front of that baby, who is described as being from the ‘Holy Land’, implying that he’s ethnic. Born of Jewish parents, but pretending to be Christian to get a Visa, no doubt,” he scoffs. “Besides, he’s , technically, a bastard, in the literal sense, as while Joseph’s name is on the birth certificate as father, but it was really God himself who got Mary up the duff. Woke nonsense, the lot of it!” According to the neo-Nazi, modern nativity scenes are trying to ‘walk back’ the real story and message of the event. “Look, we all know that Jesus was white – that was the miracle of his birth, a pure white child born of ethnic parents, destined to found the white man’s true religion,” he explains. “Those ‘Wise Men’ were definitely ethnic, but they were paying tribute to the ‘White Messiah’ and supplicating themselves before him, accepting their true place of subservience to the white race!”

Rather than being angered by such views, Bleck views those who hold them with pity. “Really, I feel sorry for these people,” he opines. “To the reactionary, the whole of Christmas must surely seem woke – all that ‘Goodwill to All Men’ bollocks, gift-giving and general merriment and bonhomie, not to mention all that bloody religious crap telling you that you should love your neighbour (even if they are a family of asylum seekers from ‘Bongo Bongoland’ on benefits) and forsake your worldly possessions! To them it must sound as if it all comes from the Jeremy Corbyn play book!” In fact, Bleck is surprised that such individuals can even bring themselves to celebrate Christmas at all. “Except, of course, that they celebrate a somewhat different version which involves getting pissed up, indulging in epic feats of gluttony, turning gift giving into a competitive exercise, pulling Christmas crackers that include exclusively racist jokes and falling asleep in front of the telly,” he points out. “Basically, it’s a celebration of consumerism, not to mention very conspicuous consumption. Instead of ‘Joy to the World’, it’s ‘Fuck You to the World, you bastards’. This is what they like to call the ‘traditional Christmas’ and woe betide anyone who has the temerity to do anything different – they’re woke bastards, obviously, out to ruin everyone’s fun.”

But, as Bleck pints out, nobody actually tries to impose their supposedly woke Christmases on the ‘traditionalists’ – they merely point out that there are alternative, equally valid, ways to celebrate the season. “But for the ‘traditionalists’, the mere fact that these alternatives exist is the problem: for them there can only be one ‘real’ Christmas to be celebrated and anything else is just ‘woke bollocks’,” says the academic. “The very idea that there could be another sort of Christmas apparently completely invalidates their version. Which, obviously, it should.” For most of modern history, he contends, these two competing visions of Christmas have managed to co-exist, but recent decades has seen the ‘politicisation’ of Christmas, as it became another battleground in the right’s ‘culture wars’. “It’s the natural evolution of the old right-wing media refrain from a few years ago that there was a ‘War on Christmas’,” he argues. “Entirely spurious scare-mongering about how ‘multi culturalism’ was eroding the ‘traditional’ British Christmas – completely ignoring the fact that the latter institution had largely been invented by the Victorians and was barely more than a century old itself, having displaced older forms of celebrating the season.”

For his part, Jeremiah Clackson is vowing to defend ‘his Christmas from ‘wokery’. “I don’t bloody care what anybody says – I’m going to be having a fried breakfast on Christmas Day, with lots of bacon – so sod off Muslim apologists! It’s a British tradition! I’ll also drinking wine by the bottle, eating cranberry sauce neat and falling asleep in front of The Great Escapein the afternoon – another great British tradition,” the ruddy faced, increasingly corpulent commentator shouted in his latest newspaper column. “And yes, at some point this Christmas, I’ll be having bloody gammon! British gammon! Even though my doctor says that if I don’t change my lifestyle I could drop dead at any minute – I’m willing to risk my life to defend the great British Christmas!” Shatley-Lemmon, however, is unlikely to be enjoying such a traditional British Christmas, currently being in Brazil and facing criminal charges if he returns to the UK. “But I’ll be thinking about turkey, Christmas pudding and mince pies as I lie on the beach,” he has assured his followers on social media. “So, I’ll be celebrating a British Christmas in spirit!”