Christmas comes but once a year too often

Imagine a scientist telling you about an experiment he's planning. He will select a group of people who have nothing in common except being related by blood or marriage, place them in a confined space, feed them massive amounts of sugar, protein and alcohol, expose them to a nonstop barrage of degraded, overfamiliar entertainment, turn the heating up, and see who cracks first. You'd call that cruel and inhuman. And yet that what's many of us volunteer for, every year.

Why do we do it? Why do we succumb to the seasonal plague of sadomasochistic insanity that we call Christmas? Simple. It's because we get sentimental.

Sentimentality is a form of emotional totalitarianism. The greatest tyrants are invariably sentimental. Hitler, drooling over his unpleasant dog and slapping his lederhosen to the martial rhythm of sanctimonious Teutonic folk songs; Mao Zedong, spellbound by the shrill pieties of the Chinese Opera, many of whose plots feature children who love their parents so much that it nearly breaks their stout little hearts to denounce them to the secret police; Stalin, wiping away an avuncular tear as he pats the heads of Young Pioneers, many of whose murders he will authorize a few years later without a blink. And what could be more sentimental than the crazed bucolic vision that inspired Pol Pot and his regime to commit genocide?

I blame Charles Dickens. At least, in part. Which is a pity because I love Dickens and nearly all his work. I even love some of his writing about Christmas. For many years I would read The Pickwick Papers every December, contriving to arrive on Christmas day at the sublime passages depicting Christmas at Mr Wardle's farm. But Dickens ruined it all with A Christmas Carol. I may be unusual in that I interpret the story as a tragedy. The hero, Scrooge, an admirably clear-sighted realist, undergoes a ghastly conversion and is reduced to driveling imbecility simply because he's informed, by a trio of unconvincing holograms, of something that a noble pragmatist like him would surely understand better than most people. Namely, that he will meet the fate that awaits us all. He will die and no one will care very much.

This Christmas the media will begin supplying us with a ceaseless and indiscriminate supply of Dickens, that will continue well beyond the point of overdose on Dickens's 200th birthday, February 7th, because a bunch of people in the media have decided that this anniversary is an excuse to declare 2012 the 'Year of Dickens,' and to do even less original thinking than usual, for at least twelve months. And amid all this, we're going to be seeing far too much of A Christmas Carol. We'll also read, hear and see a lot of crap about Dickens, mostly from people who don't really care about his writing, but have a lot to say about what his writing means. People will say all kinds of stupid stuff. Things like, "Of course, if Dickens were alive today, he'd probably be writing television drama or even soaps." I don't think so. If Dickens were alive today he'd probably be selling small, very expensive bottles of whatever it is that's kept him alive for two hundred years. But who am I to complain? All I can do is advise you to read Bleak House, if you only read one book by Dickens, but to read everything he ever wrote if you have a chance. Yes, even A Christmas Carol, because a second rate book by Dickens is better than a first rate one by nearly any other writer. "God bless us, one and all!" in the words of Tiny Tim, the rotten little creep.

Meanwhile, I'm with Scrooge, before he became a pussy, and I leave you with the thought that Christmas comes but every fucking year.