St Tescos Calls the Faithful to Prayer
17/09/2010

Ho! Ho! Ho! ‘Tis the season to make a jolly good profit. Only 98 more shopping days to the Great Marketing Opportunity of the Year, and the big supermarkets are already cashing in. Sainsbury’s have been stocking mince pies since the beginning of September and Christmas puddings are currently on offer on a three-for-two basis. Not to be outdone, Tesco have started a special offer on chocolate Santas. And Christmas decorations will go on sale later this month according to The Grocer magazine.

Whoever said that ‘Christmas comes but once a year’ got it badly wrong. The season now occupies five months of the year, if you count the hangover into January, after which we start preparing in earnest for Easter. How come all this hoopla for an event that an increasing number of us have come to dread?

I don’t think it will come as any great surprise to you if I reveal that it is being driven by the retail sector. Those who complain that the commercialisation of Christmas has obscured its true meaning couldn’t be more wrong. Christmas has always been about consumption, ever since it was invented by Charles Dickens in A Christmas Carol, his hugely popular novel that set the model for the ‘traditional’ Victorian-style Christmas.

Until then, Christmas was barely celebrated in Britain at all.  The old rhyme about ‘It was Christmas day in the workhouse …’ was literally true. The majority of the populace spent that day (like every other day) doing 12 hours of back-breaking work in mills and factories, and Dickens wrote his novel as a sort of political tract to protest against the Scrooge-like bosses who exploited them.

Unfortunately, his worthy efforts rather backfired on him. His celebration of family feasting and exchanging of presents proved a big hit with the up and coming middle classes, and they bought into it big time. It wasn’t long before the mill and factory owners who were the villains of his novels saw the commercial potential of Christmas as a consumer fest that offered a thriving new market for them. The rest is history.

As to the religious content of Christmas, it’s actually 99.9% pagan. December the 25th is not Jesus Christ’s birthday. It’s the date of the old winter solstice on which the Romans celebrated Saturnalia with all its attendant revelries, and which was later inserted in the Christian calendar to make pagan converts feel at home.

So there you have it. Talking about religion, I’m beginning to sound as if I’ve lost faith in Saints Tesco and Sainsburys and their true prophet, Advertising, which will never do.  So, after me then: “O come all ye faithful and spend, spend, spend!”