WHILE I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION: How long will Christmas remain unchallenged?
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I was a bit dismayed to see comments declaring Inverness’s festive decorations, especially the Falcon Square Christmas tree, inadequate compared with other cities, writes Charles Bannerman.
The tree is actually rather nice, if perhaps a few degrees off vertical. And as someone who remembers a string of painted light bulbs on the Greig Street Bridge as the town’s festive highlight, I think our street adornments are very cheerful at this dark time of year.
Inverness hasn’t gone down the rather vulgar route of “more is best” and what we do have is perfectly adequate and tasteful.
I’m not so sure, though, about the length of time that we and other cities display these things. They seem to spark into life mid-November and it’s well into January before the show ends, which means about seven weeks of Christmas illuminations.
I even wonder how long it’s going to take Christmas to catch up with Black Friday and have celebrations which seem to start on July 1 and end on June 30.
And is it too “bah humbug” to dismiss the commercialisation of Christmas as people spending money they don’t have buying people they often don’t like things they don’t need?
You can get too much of a good thing and I’ll quite soon be getting a bit weary of Merry Gentlemen, Herald Angels and Figgy Puddings.
If anything is going to limit Christmas lighting in the future, look no further than environmental pressures. Given the serious and fundamental changes and reductions in our energy use that have already begun, what chance do street after street of extra, non-essential lighting for almost two months a year have of justifying their carbon footprint?
Looking at the epidemic of virtue signalling about carbon neutrality already under way, I don’t think Christmas lights will remain unchallenged for long.
After all, they scrapped incandescent bulbs in homes years ago for lower power ones, even though that’s a partial con since the extra heat of incandescent ones correspondingly reduced reliance on a building’s heating.
So what chance thousands of coloured bulbs blasting heat and light out into the freezing atmosphere purely for aesthetic purposes?
But are Christmas trees not an endangered species as well? As a German invention, do they not fall at the modern day hurdle of cultural appropriation?
So hang on. What about school and church Nativity plays, then? It’s two years now since Sheffield University banned sombreros as part of Halloween costumes amid indignant howls about cultural appropriation. And just this week, Glasgow Warriors rugby club asked Exeter Chiefs fans not to wear Indian head dresses.
Where, then, does that leave kids strapping dish towels round their heads and gathering round a crib?
It must therefore only be a matter of time before Christmas itself is roundly denounced by some as cultural appropriation.
After all, the majority of people who celebrate it are not Christians, so are therefore appropriating, and indeed subverting through commercialism, the culture of those who do practise that religion.
Devil’s advocacy is a wonderful thing. Merry Christmas.
Fears over Inshes roundabout changes
