Have a blogging good Christmas

BY ROBBIE SMYTH

Are you finding it hard to get into the Christmas spirit? Do you want to be on the cutting edge of festive fashions and trends, or are you just wondering about that gift for a special partner? Or are you seeking revenge for decades of socks and other unwanted presents foisted on you by uncaring friends and relatives over the years? Well, there is a solution, and it’s on the web.
OK, so Santa has been taking emails for many years now and yes, you can go online and watch the elves at work through well-placed webcams, but did you know that in the USA they are now into the second year of a War on Christmas? That the Dalai Lama sends Christmas Cards? That Graffiti artist Banksy runs a Santa’s Ghetto shop every year in London? Do you really know how to properly celebrate an “Irish Christmas”, or that there is a growing Buy Nothing Christmas movement?
Yep, didn’t think so. And then there’s the viral video world of YouTube and IFilm, filled with Christmas videos on any subject you’d like to mention – some that are not fit for a quality paper like An Phoblacht. There are over 37,000 Christmas-related videos on YouTube alone!

War on Christmas
But first, to the front of the War on Christmas (as they say in Wedding Crashers, “We lost a lot of good men there”). The war began – not unsurprisingly – on Fox TV, whose “journalists” Bill O’Reilly and Fox News host John Gibson sought to target the dissidents who dare to say “Happy Holiday” instead of the more acceptable “Merry Christmas”. According to O’Reilly, “It’s all part of the secular progressive agenda ... to get Christianity and spirituality and Judaism out of the public square.”
The war came to a crisis last year, when President Bush’s official Christmas card dared to wish “Happy Holiday”. All of Fox TV’s fears were realised: the White House had fallen to the secular progressives.
The Fox contingent have had some success. Many department stores in the US have been pressurised into changing their Christmas slogans and displays to have a bit more Nativity and a bit more Santa (the fact that Santa and Christmas trees have more to do with Coca Cola and the British Royal family is overlooked), and now John Gibson has written a book called The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought. Just search Amazon if you want a copy for that aunt who keeps sending you the striped socks.
Mediamatters.org and Wikipedia have good coverage on news from the war front, while the Daily Show at Comedy Central has some funny downloadable videos making fun of O’Reilly and Fox.

White House Christmas
While the White House may be courting controversy with its Christmas card, the Bush family are having a traditional Christmas and all the details are at whitehouse.gov. “Deck the halls and welcome all” is the greeting on the presidential website’s guide to their holiday programme. You can look at the videos of the White House Christmas decorations and Laura Bush receiving the official 18ft Christmas tree. Perhaps the best bit of the Bush Christmas is that you can actually buy White House Christmas decorations on line at whitehousechristmasornament.com. For $26 you can buy a 2006 Christmas tree decoration that “portrays Air Force One flying under the Presidential Seal. An American bald eagle holds a ribbon in its beak; the ribbon has the motto of the USA.” You can also get a 2005 Secret Service ornament for the special price of $20.

Microsoft
We have all heard of the dubious concept of re-gifting, the simple explanation of which is the rewrapping of unwanted presents which are then passed on to other unsuspecting recipients. It seems that we could all have been victims of re-gifting in the past. Now at MSN’s moneycentral.msn. com, there is a handy article explaining 12 rules for how to “regift without fear”.
Also in the strange world of Microsoft, at its small business centre you can read about “five mistakes that could ruin your holiday sales”. At Microsoft Australia there is a warning to Christmas shoppers to “stay alert against pirated software”.

An Irish Christmas
OK, so you might live in Ireland, and maybe think of yourself as Irish, but are you having an Irish Christmas? No, I didn’t think so. According to Ireland-information.com, many of our Christmas traditions “have their root in the time when the Gaelic culture and religion of the country were being suppressed”.
These traditions include placing a lighted candle in the window on Christmas Eve and resetting the table after Christmas Eve dinner to leave a loaf of bread with caraway seeds and raisins. Help, I don’t even know what a caraway seed looks like! Then there is the Wren Boy procession, and placing holly on doors.
However, christmasarchives. com tells us that Christmas arrived in Ireland in 1171, when Henry II had a Christmas feast here to get the local chiefs to swear loyalty to him. The same website’s other advice on having an Irish Christmas involves visiting Amazon.com and buying Celtic Christmas IV.

A very merry YouTube
The new centre of Christmas on the web must be YouTube. It’s filled with the obscure, the forgotten and the bizarre for Christmas. Want to see Nat King Cole singing the original version of The Christmas Song and “chestnuts roasting on an open fire”? You got it. Want to see Bing Crosby and David Bowie sing Little Drummer Boy? You got it. It goes on and on, to people’s videos of their Christmas trees, their decorations outside the house and to favourite movie clips. It even has the Johnny Cash Christmas show. Be warned: you might spend a long time here browsing; it is addictive!

Buy Nothing Christmas
The great thing about YouTube is that it is free –  a scarce commodity in the modern Christmas, as giving can be very expensive and the An Phoblacht bonus scheme is long defunct. But there are alternative Christmas options. Buynothingchristmas.org is a website started five years ago by Canadian Mennonites and offers an alternative view. It argues for not going overboard at Christmas.

Alternative gifts
Another growing trend at Christmas is alternative Christmas gifts. Worldland trust.org offers a chance to “save an acre of rain forest forever”. Oxfamunwrapped. com is one online option for buying mosquito nets, with a goat for £24 and a donkey for £50. Concern Ireland also has an online gift service at concernwithlove.org. The Concern donkey is €47, which is a bit cheaper than Oxfam’s (at current exchange rates Oxfam’s donkey costs €73). Goats at trocaire.ie are €40 or £28, so Oxfam’s goats seem a bit cheaper. Bothar offers an “in-kid dairy goat” for €300. So maybe you should shop around.

Dalai Lama’s Christmas card
Last word must go to the former US Senator and presidential candidate Bob Dole, some of whose Christmas cards are available to look at online at ljworld.com. You can see the Christmas card from current Republican presidential hopeful John McCain and even one from the Dalai Lama. So Santa must deliver in Tibet too!