It’s the week before Christmas and this is the last postcard from the paradise of woke for 2019. We thought we’d go out with a bonbon bang and devote the whole article to Christmas crackers from around the world. Read on for a whole Santa sack full of woke Christmas stories, ranging from the savage to the ridiculous.  

Christmas Crackers I: All’s fair in woke and war

Our lead story for this week is disturbing, rather than amusing, showing as it does just how far leftist activists have descended into the woke abyss. Not content with the usual playbook antics of badgering law-abiding citizens, shutting down free speech and inconveniencing commuters, ‘anti-capitalist’ agitators in Toulouse have taken the game to a whole new level. They’ve resorted to bullying and terrifying children.  

A horde of about 50 activists decrying fascists, cops and capitalists descended on the annual nativity play and concert. They hurled abuse at child participants and the audience, forcing the production’s closure only an hour into its proposed three-hour running time.  

Heroes, one and all. 

Christmas Crackers II: Queering Christmas 

A couple of weeks ago we told you that, contrary to popular opinion, the story of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was really one about bullying and exploitation. Well, this week we’ve learned that it’s also the ‘queerest holiday special ever’. 

In a heart-warming  opinion piece for the New York Times, trans writer and activist Jennifer Finney-Boyle (pronouns unknown) draws correlations between the film and the writer’s own journey of trans self-discovery and finds LGBTQI+ characters and code lurking under every holly bush: 

There’s plenty of queer code in Christmastown. After Rudolph’s red nose shines in his father Donner’s cave, for instance, causing Donner a curiously profound mortification, the old man comes up with a fake nose for his boy to wear. You know: so as not to offend The Straights.

And then, there’s Hermey the Elf. Beautiful and blond where all the other elves resemble bulbous-nosed Vulcans, all he wants is to be able to be himself (a dentist, in fact), instead of being forced to toil in Santa’s soul-crushing toy factory.

While Finney-Boyle, on the other hand, has found a haven at the NY Times nut factory. 

Christmas Crackers III: Sustainable Santa stand-in 

A Melbourne childcare centre held its end of year party last week which may not seem too remarkable — until you find out who the guest of honour was. If you guessed Santa, Rudolph, the baby Jesus, an angel or any character remotely connected to anything Christmasy you would, of course, be dead wrong.  

The character spreading festive cheer this year was, wait for it, a ‘sustainability pirate’. Methinks that someone was three sheets to the wind when they thought up that one.  Obviously, nothing says Christmas quite like the Jolly Roger. Blistering barnacles!  

While it’s unclear what a sustainability pirate actually does – keelhauling, pillaging and flogging are probably out – centre management assured concerned parents that its ‘priority is that everyone feels welcome regardless of their religion, culture or spiritual beliefs’.   

Somebody, please pass the rum. 

Christmas Crackers IV: No nativity please, we’re atheists

Chisholm elementary school in Oklahoma dropped the nativity scene from its annual Christmas production after the area’s public school superintendent received a letter from an American atheist group.  

In the letter Grinchopher – sorry, Christopher – Line, a lawyer for the Freedom From Religion Foundation claimed – apparently, incorrectly – that such performances would breach the US constitution: 

While a public school can hold holiday concerts, religious performances and instruction that emphasize the religious aspects of a holiday are prohibited … A live nativity performance celebrating the story of Jesus’s birth is precisely the sort of religious endorsement prohibited by the Establishment Clause.

Christmas Crackers V: Christmas wokewords 

There are secular Christmas songs, and then there are Christmas carols, or hymns, which by definition and history, are pretty obviously religious. Funny about that. But in 2019 let’s not let Christian tradition and faith get in the way of an ‘inclusive’ Christmas. 

A Fox News report said that East London’s Whitehall Primary School has tweaked some words of the classic carol, Away in a Manger, for this year’s Christmas celebration. ‘Little Lord Jesus’ will now be referred to as ‘little baby Jesus’.  

The order came from Zakia Khatun, the school’s headteacher, who said that 60 students out of 500 did not attend last year’s Nativity Tuesday celebration due to their religious beliefs.

There was plenty of blowback from parents and religious organisations in the area but don’t think that the Diocese of Chelmsford was among the voices of dissent. Oh, no! It’s hunky-dory to remove Christ from Christmas, according to them: 

The service maintains the traditional Christian message of the joy of Christmas in a way that can be celebrated by everyone, including those of other faiths and none.

So, the traditional Christmas message is just about joy, and for no particular reason, it would seem. So remind me, what are we celebrating? 

I’m surprised that they wanted to include Away in a Manger at all, given its religious lyrics. We haven’t heard about any other re-writes but the uplifting words of other endearing Christmas Carols couldn’t have made it past the woke censors, either. It’s a little hard to eliminate the fact that Jesus is the reason for the season. Consider these: 

Joy to the World – Joy to the world! The Lord is come, Let earth receive her king;  

O Come, All Ye Faithful – Come and behold Him, Born the King of Angels!;  

O Holy Night – It is the night of our dear Saviour’s birth.  

God help the world if in the Christmases of the future it won’t just be in shopping centres and large celebrity Carols by Candlelight events that we’ll be forced to endure the woeful warblings of Mariah Carey, Justin Bieber, Rihanna and their counterparts in Christmas crime.  

And so from the ridiculous to the sublime. I’m off to crank up the soaring notes of the Vienna Boys Choir singing O Holy Night. 

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