Paul Poulton comments on the festive season

Paul Poulton

If any visitors from another planet are reading this, I'd like to explain what we do around this time of year. A year is one revolution of planet Earth around the sun; we split our orbit up into 12 sections we call months.

It's important to note that on this westerly side of the planet we hold two festivals during the month we are now in, they are both interesting in their own way.

The first thing to state is that you cannot celebrate both festivals; you must choose which one you want to celebrate at least 25 days before the great day itself.

Let's say you want to celebrate the first festival: If so, you must make a list on a large sheet of paper of all the people you know, you must do this early on in the run up to the great day. You then need to get quite a number of other bits of paper, smaller in size but firmer to the touch. The firmer bits of paper must have pictures on them; the pictures could for instance, have modern looking country-type houses with snow on their roof-tops, it may help to have some small boys in the picture who in their tom-foolery are throwing balls of snow at each other. Or by way of change, the pictures could have some people who are ice-skating on a frozen pond and it helps if they are wearing scarves around their necks but little else. A further variation could be a scene of our ancestors travelling through the snow in a horse drawn carriage; they also need to be dressed in winter attire such as our predecessors used to wear 200 years ago. And for the more adventurous the hard bit of paper may contain a risqué joke that pertains to the time of year we are in. Once all these bits of paper with pictures on them have been amassed, put into envelopes and addressed, they have to be sent to all the people on the list. Then all the people on the list have to send them all back to you. If someone who has not been written down on your list sends you one of these bits of harder paper with a picture on which arrives through your door only a few days prior to the day of the festival, then various curses can be uttered against the sender of that particular piece of hard paper. But when you have pronounced your bitter malediction, (a denunciation invoking a wish or threat of evil or injury,) to your satisfaction, you must - it's the rules - go out into the cold and buy them a hard piece of paper with a picture on it and make sure they receive it before the great day.

There is also the matter of gifts; the rules for this are not so easy to follow. People who celebrate the first festival can send a selected few people from their list a gift in honour of the festival. It needs to be ascertained - and this is the hard bit - how much the person you are buying your gift for will spend on the gift they are buying for you. It can cause considerable consternation to you throughout the whole festive period if you end up paying more for a person's gift than the person paid for your gift. Indeed, it has been known to ruin hitherto good friendships which have never recovered. A note here about the gifts may also be wise: The gifts themselves have to be of the sort that the person you are buying the gift for can't actually use in any way that is useful to them.

One more point about the early stages of things-to-do before the main day of the festival. Lately quite a number of people have been taking part in a certain competition. The rules of the competition are not yet officially formulated, suffice to say that you must hang more coloured lights on the outside of the house where you live than anyone else in the street in which you reside. The competition has in fact turned out to be a dangerous pursuit with people injuring themselves and falling from ladders and roof-tops in a valiant attempt to place larger and more brilliant shiny lights than anyone else in their vicinity. The authorities may well be labelling it an "extreme sport" in the near future. Those who survive the harrowing business of securing the mawkish luminous monstrosities about the exterior of their homes still risk injury because there is the little matter of paying the utility bill when it arrives a few weeks later. Some competitors have gone into shock for a period of several weeks upon them seeing the cost of taking part in the competition.

There is also the matter of music, and this is a phenomenon that has been added to the festive rituals in the last 35 years. Music has to be played that was recorded from a brief period between 1972 AD to 1975 AD. The music was recorded by certain bands and singers. The royalties from the songs have gone on to provide a very useful pension for the artists who performed the songs, something we are all happy about because we love those bands dearly.

Okay, we are making good progress, let us move on to the last day of labour, the day when work stops before the special day. This day is usually shorter than most working days as employers can be blackmailed by the threat of being called the name of a character in a famous book by one of the most celebrated writers of the 19th century. This famous character failed to celebrate the festival and his name has been a by word for 'meanness of spirit' ever since. No employer wants to be known by this name, which of course can be used to great effect by the work-force and the result of this blackmail is usually a short working day that finishes at lunch time. Once work has finished on this last working day the workers go to a special place to hold a sacred assembly. This hallowed building has a flat wooden altar about waist-high, upright handles are located on the alter and a lady whom may be likened to a high priestess from days gone by, comes and pulls one of the handles and fluid spurts from an orifice which the lady skilfully catches in a jar, and men (and women) consume the fluid in honour of the festival. Some men (and women) consume so much of the fluid that after two or three hours in the assembly they are unable to stand up. They are helped into taxis by the other workers who didn't drink quite so much fluid and sent home.

On the great day of the festival itself, the rule is, you have to eat. You have to eat about four times as much as you would on any normal day, if you can't quite manage that amount then it's okay as long as you feel slightly sick for the next few days.

So those are the requirements leading up to the first festival. No one is exactly sure what the name of this particular festival is. People use various salutations to each other that allude to the festival, hailing each other in such terms as "seasons greetings " or a variation of that might be "compliments of the season", other phrases might be "happy holidays", "Yuletide", "festive period" or "merry Xmas", some authorities have more recently been calling it "Winter-fest".

And although the first festival has a lot to commend it, there is also another festival which is perplexingly held on the same day as the first festival. This second festival does in fact have a name, its name is Christmas, and those who celebrate it also hold a sacred assembly on the morning of the festival. They think about a baby whose mother was a young girl and whose father was God. They think about what it means that someone like that was born into this world. What does it mean? And does it have any consequences for us living today? They think about the message that some spirit beings brought to earth to herald the baby's birth, the spirits said "peace on earth and goodwill to men". They think about the fact that heaven wants to bless us.