12.12.2024

Slave to the gift economy

What is the meaning of Christmas? Who is Father Christmas? What is the political economy of his Christmas operation? Jack Conrad provides some answers, but, above all, welcomes elvish resistance

All roads lead to the peak Christmas period for UK retailers. With inflation down, but interest rates still high, they are “cautiously optimistic” that 2024 will be their best year for many years.¹ Consumer confidence is inching up. The well-heeled are expected to splash out on top-end brands in top-end shops. Forecasters expect purchases to reach £88.29 billion. Revealingly, the average Christmas outlay varies from £980 per person in London to £700 in the north-east - about a quarter of annual personal expenditure and up 1.4% in real terms. Elsewhere in western Europe a contraction is predicted.²

While spending on holidays is set to rise by 6.4%, presents remain by far the biggest spending category. For children aged 7-12 the average cost of their trove is set to rise to £596 (not that the average child is so lucky).³ A small fortune, mainly accounted for by the better off buying the latest iPhones, tablets, PlayStations and other such tech for their little darlings.

Because it is such a money-spinner Christmas begins early. For retailers, especially in the Anglosphere, the season starts in earnest with the onset of October.⁴ They send out catalogues and emails. Adverts and marketing strategies are finalised. The Christmas lights get switched on in mid-November and sales steadily rise till that final orgy of bargain-hunting: the winter sales.

Christmas is also peak charity. Christian Aid, Oxfam, Unicef, Crisis, the Red Cross, Shelter, etc make an almost military push to secure donations, a good portion of which goes to pay for the costs of the staff needed (chief executive salaries of £175k+ being an industry norm⁵).

Those who want to “rediscover the true meaning of Christmas” respond in their millions. After all, ’tis the season of “peace and good will to all men”.⁶ According to the Charities Aid Foundation, some 40% of the adult population in Britain are more likely to make a donation in December … with a monthly £2.03 average increasing to £2.41.⁷ That little uptick does, however, when totalled, add up to millions of pounds.

Christmas is peak church too. Turnout for C of E services reached nearly two million in 2023 - a long way ahead of the 693,000 Sunday average and even Easter.⁸ While not quite being on a par in religious terms with Easter, Christmas comes a close second - Jesus rising from the dead being rated over having been born of a virgin.

Census and state

True, as revealed by the 2021 census, the number of self-proclaimed Christians has fallen to less than a half the population in England and Wales. We, the godless, have risen to 37.2% - 22 million up from the 14.8% in 2011. A cause of much rightwing hand-wringing and xenophobic anguish. The country has lost its identity. Well, theirs maybe, not mine. Yet, despite the welcome rise in atheism, the irrefutable fact of the matter is that the UK remains constitutionally Christian.

Charles Windsor is head of the Church of England - a Catholic-Protestant state hybrid. Bishops sit by right in the upper house of parliament - there are the lords temporal and the lords spiritual. Every Christmas, state personifications, not least the (feudal) green king, do pulpit readings, say prayers begging for the forgiveness of their sins and loudly sing hymns and carols, ancient and modern.

Who knows what Sir Keir Starmer will be doing this Christmas? It will be mildly interesting to see. He is, after all, a self-declared atheist, while his wife, Lady Victoria, is Jewish. Anyway, we shall certainly have official Britain parading its commitment to the ‘Christmas spirit’ and Charles III reiterating his “particular relationship” with and “commitment to the Church of England”.⁹

This reference to the sovereign’s “particular relationship” regarding the C of E relates, of course, to his role as “Supreme Governor of the Church of England” - a title dating back to the 16th century reformation and Henry VIII, which is meant to confer special responsibilities upon the monarch to supervise those who run the state church, both in terms of its “administration and its pastoral care”.¹⁰ Like every other House of Windsor monarch - from George V to Elizabeth II - Charles III is committed to the 39 articles of faith, in word, if not deed - he is, after all, a divorcee and an admitted adulterer.

Not that Charles III suffered the fate of Edward VIII. He wanted to marry the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson. Both Stanley Baldwin’s Tory government and the Church of England were implacably opposed. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang, declared that he would find it impossible to administer the coronation oath on Edward, unless he accepted the indissolubility of marriage. In his own words, Lang said that he - that is the king - pursued personal happiness “in a manner inconsistent with the Christian principles of marriage”.¹¹ The uncrowned Edward VIII abdicated in December 1936.

Clearly, Justin Welby suffered no such scruples. However, there are, of course, good reasons to believe that establishment objections to Edward Windsor owed rather more to his openly proclaimed sympathies for Nazi Germany than religious doctrine over marriage vows. In the mid-1930s, with both countries gearing up for war, he was talked about by Adolf Hitler himself as England’s potential collaborator king.¹²

Traditional Jesus

The traditional Christmas nativity - meaning ‘birth’, from the Latin nātīvitās - relies on the New Testament. Accordingly, Mary and Joseph, the ‘parents’ of Jesus, are pictured travelling from their native Nazareth, in the northern province of Galilee, to Judea and Bethlehem (the royal seat of the semi-mythical king David). The New Testament gets them making this arduous journey because of an entirely fictitious Roman census - a census that requires people to go to their place of birth. An impractical and entirely ridiculous notion.

We also have the parents of Jesus not being able to find a room at the inn, the stable and the manger, adoring shepherds, the three wise men, the magi, following a wondrous star, travelling from the east bearing gifts for the new born King of the Jews, Herod ordering the slaughter of all first-born male children under two, and an angel urging Joseph to flee to Egypt with his wife and baby. All unmistakable fabulation.

However, the Hebrew prophet, Micah, had written of the coming messiah (the redeemer, the liberator) being born in Bethlehem. Though the New Testament Jesus is supposed to have been conceived by the Holy Spirit, not Joseph, two of the testaments, Matthew and Luke, trace his family tree back from Joseph to David, and finally to the first man, Adam himself. In other words, Jesus and his party propagandists were claiming that he was of royal blood - the legitimate king of Israel. Unlike the upstart Herodians. Not that this is made explicit by the New Testament redactors. No, on the contrary, Jesus, the apocalyptic revolutionary, the leader of a popular revolt, is stripped of his Jewish identity, his real history and made into a Greek-style man-god. The kingdom of this Jesus is not here on earth, but in the misty realms of heaven.

During the 1st and 2nd centuries Palestine was a hotbed of revolutionary activity in the Roman empire. The aristocratic Jewish writer, Flavius Josephus, mentions numerous urban and rural uprisings. Riots erupted in Jerusalem with almost every great festival. In the countryside guerrilla foci found themselves gaining enough adherents to allow regular military units to be formed. Their leaders sometimes had themselves crowned kings on the messianic model. Among them was Simon, a former slave of Herod and Athronges, who was once a shepherd. However, the most successful liberation fighter was Judas, whose father, Ezechias, was a well known “bandit” who was executed in 47 BCE. Josephus fumes that Judas “tried to stir the natives to revolt” by encouraging them not to pay taxes to the Romans. Judas “was a rabbi” (teacher), says Josephus, “with a sect of his own, and was quite unlike the others”.¹³ His message was republican, not monarchist: ‘The people should have no master except god’.

What Josephus calls the fourth philosophy had many names, including ‘sicarii’ and ‘zealot’. Its various components and factions dominated popular politics throughout the 66-70 Jewish revolution and the final heroic stand at the desert fortress of Masada in 74 - rather than surrender to the Romans the 960 rebels preferred mass suicide. Despite being a member of the establishment, and someone seeking to ingratiate himself with the Romans, Josephus has to admit that these “bandits” and “false prophets” inspired the masses “to bold deeds”. Their “madness infected the entire people”, he writes sorrowfully.

Strange Jesus

Set against this nationalist-religious background, the New Testament Jesus is a very strange person, to say the least. Nowhere does he challenge or even question Roman occupation of Judea and indirect rule of Galilee (at the time of Jesus it was ruled by a pro-Roman Jewish satrap - Herod Antipas). Instead he appears to positively love the Roman tyrant. There is, for example, the centurion of Capernaum. Jesus not only cures his servant with one of his miracles. He marvels at the centurion’s religious conviction: “Truly, I say to you, not even in Israel have I found such faith”¹⁴ Jesus even urges the Jewish masses to dutifully pay Roman taxes: “Render unto Caesar ...”¹⁵ Something akin to Tommy Sheridan telling the people of Glasgow the rightness of paying the poll tax under Margaret Thatcher. And yet incongruously Jesus manages to gain an enthusiastic mass following among the rural and urban poor.

This writer takes it, note, that Jesus was an actual living, breathing, feeling human being - that despite the fact that we have no genuine, authentic, contemporary accounts of him. The New Testament was finalised long after his death by redactors who obviously had little knowledge of early 1st century Judaism. Then there are the passages in the Jewish antiquities (supposedly written by Josephus) glorifying him: ie, calling him the “Christ” - universally regarded by serious-minded scholars as crude forgeries.

Of course, there have been countless claims by this, that or the other two-a-penny pundit to have discovered the real Jesus. Mostly, however, it amounts to “looking back” through some two thousand years of Christian darkness and finding their own conservative, liberal or leftwing reflection staring back at them from the “bottom of a deep well”.¹⁶

We can, though, using historical materialism to provide a reliable framework, and a lot of textual deduction and inference, reveal a probable Jesus. As a first step, what is demonstrably untrue can safely be put aside; what chimes with the events, the class struggles and the ideological outlook of his fourth-philosophy contemporaries and immediate successors can be retained, albeit with due caution.

Hence, the probable Jesus would not have disowned his family … four of his brothers are listed amongst his core disciples in the gospels. Nor would the probable Jesus have preached collaboration with the Romans, he would, on the contrary, have urged people to resist them and withhold their taxes. Exactly, the crime that the “chief priests and officers” charged him with before the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate: “We have found this man perverting our nation, and forbidding us to give tribute to Caesar”.¹⁷ Certainly Jesus would not have said: “Do not resist one who is evil.”¹⁸ The idea is a monstrosity, fit only for despairing appeasers. Jewish scripture is packed full of worthy men and women, above all prophets, fighting what they saw as evil - not least foreign oppressors.

After the execution of John the Baptist, Jesus reveals himself to be not simply a prophetic ‘preparer of the way’, but the messiah. An extraordinary claim, but one fully within the Jewish thought-world. In biblical tradition there had been prophet-rulers (Moses and Samuel). Jesus was claiming to be the messiah-king: ie, the final king. In Jesus the spiritual and secular would be joined. A bold idea, which must have “aroused tremendous enthusiasm in his followers, and great hope in the country generally”.¹⁹ Perhaps this explains why after he died on a Roman cross the Jesus party refused to believe he was really dead. His claimed status put him on a par with Elijah: he would return at the appointed hour to lead the Jewish people to victory.

New Testament (re)writers are at pains to play down or deny Jesus’ assumed royal title. Claiming to be King of the Jews was to openly rebel against Rome. Instead they concentrate on terms like ‘messiah’, which they present as being other-worldly. The Jews, including the 12 leading disciples, are shown as not understanding this concept, though it existed in many of their sacred texts, which they had, surely, studied and fully internalised.

Evidently, Jesus showed no interest in military strategy or tactics. Rome would be beaten without recourse either to conventional or guerrilla war. Nevertheless, though Jesus did not organise his followers into military units, at least five of his inner circle clearly came from the ranks of the revolutionary ‘bandits’ and proudly retained their guerrilla nicknames (ie, Peter Barjonah - ‘outlaw’, Simon - the zealot; James and John - ‘sons of thunder’, and Judas Iscariot - the ‘dagger man’).

This is hardly surprising. Jesus was no pacifist: “I come not to send peace, but a sword!”²⁰ However, liberation would not depend on rousing the masses to stage a general uprising, but supernatural intervention. There would be a cosmic battle, where a tiny army of the righteous triumph against overwhelmingly superior forces. According to scripture, Gideon fought and won against the Midianites with only 300 men - he told the other 20,000 men in his army to “return home”.²¹ Jesus promised something along those lines ... but even more fantastic.

Following the last supper, a highly charged prelude to the ‘last days’, his disciples inform him that they only have two swords. Jesus calmly replies: “It is enough.”²² He appears convinced that Yahweh will send him “12 legions of angels” to fight the Romans.²³

The aims of Jesus and the guerrilla fighters were broadly compatible. Where they differed was the degree that their strategy relied on heavenly intervention. Either way, the zealots were unlikely to have actively opposed Jesus. He might have been a factional rival, but he was no enemy. His mass movement would at the very least have been seen as an tremendous opportunity to spread their word.

After the final apocalyptic victory over the Romans, Jesus fervently believed he would preside over god’s new order - a communism where the poor inherit the earth and the rich get their just deserts:

[B]lessed be you poor, for yours is the kingdom of god .... But woe unto you that are rich ... Woe unto you that are full now, for you shall hunger. Woe unto you that laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep.²⁴

Of course, Jesus failed - like the other 1st and 2nd century Jewish revolutionaries. However, unlike them, though, he never faded in memory. Leadership of his party passed first to his brother, James the Just, then his cousin, Simeon. But it was Paul who was the real founder of Christianity. His entirely new, Hellenistic, Jesus religion, became, hundreds of years later, under Constantine, the official state cult of the Roman empire.

Happy birthday

My book, Fantastic reality, deals with what happened after Jesus died and I am not going to repeat the argument here. Suffice to say, what needs to be appreciated for our current purpose is that not only is the biblical account of Jesus full of reinvention: so too is Christmas … but on steroids.

Take December 25 and anno Domini 1. It is quite possible that Jesus was born that day. The odds are 365:1 (ie, 0.0027%). In fact the odds are considerably greater than that, though, because we have no idea about which year he was born in. Many scholars reckon between 6-4 BCE.

Clearly there was a wish amongst early Christians - that is, the followers of Paul - to give Jesus a birth date which could be celebrated. Around 200 CE Clement of Alexandria writes:

There are those who have determined not only the year of our Lord’s birth, but also the day; and they say that it took place in the 28th year of Augustus, and in the 25th day of [the Egyptian month] Pachon [May 20] ... Further, others say that he was born on the 24th or 25th of Pharmuthi [April 20 or 21].²⁵

Either way, in the early 4th century the western church fixed on December 25. The first recorded Christmas celebration was in Rome in 336.²⁶ Not because of the recovery of a lost collective memory or through exhaustive research: rather because the church needed a date.

Why December 25? From the earliest times, northern peoples marked the winter solstice. Called in Old English Gēola or Yule, in Old French Noël or Naël. The longest night of the year is December 21 - a sacred moment of death and rebirth. The sun reaches its lowest point in the sky, but, heralding spring, begins to rise again.

The Romans, famously, had their Saturnalia, when masters waited on their domestic slaves, gifts were exchanged, along with much drinking, feasting and fornication. Beginning on December 17 the festival culminated on December 23. Some eastern churches, sticking as they do to this or that version of the old Julian calendar, celebrate Christmas on January 6 or 7 (the birth of Jesus being connected to the Epiphany: that is, the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan, when god was supposed to have revealed himself in his only begotten son).

It is the same with many other Christian festivals, Easter included. The new colonised the old. But it is perfectly understandable. After all, we all need a break from the normal routine, we need special days to bring us together, we all need to party. The labour movement adopted May 1 - May Day - as its special day in 1904, partially because it was the long established day to celebrate fertility and the beginning of summer. But mainly because we simply required a day to display international solidarity, our strength and readiness to assume state power.

The Christian church too. Except that its archbishops, bishops, abbots and deacons were incorporated first into the Roman state, then the feudal system, as privileged, but junior, partners. That said, our labour and social democratic parties, parliamentary representatives and trade union general secretaries have, in large measure, been thoroughly incorporated, once again as junior partners - part of the system’s managed decline.

So from its earliest history the Christian church has been bound up with paganism. Nowadays, of course, the pagan winter solstice has not only been Christianised: it has been thoroughly commercialised too. Christmas therefore combines pagan, Christian and capitalist elements. Mistletoe, holly, ivy and other evergreens have their origins in the deep past. They symbolise life, sex and renewal. Church services and nativity plays are a Christian overlay. Christmas cards; Christmas trees with lights, baubles and expensive presents; Christmas class reconciliation and shmaltzery - all that comes via 19th century capitalism. Prince Albert, Charles Dickens and the Oxford movement each made their own particular contribution to the transformation of Christmas from a raucous community celebration into a children, family and home-centred occasion.

Christmasland

Father Christmas just about sums it up. With antecedents in the Norse god Odin, via Saint Nicholas - ie, Santa Claus, the modern Father Christmas, as he is known in England, with his jovial ho-ho-ho personality, black, shiny boots, white, fur-trimmed red suit, his sleigh and reindeer - he is a 19th century reinvention (cemented in the popular imagination by Coca-Cola adverts beginning in 1931²⁷).

Father Christmas is also a precursor of Jeff Bezos and Amazon. Elves, kitted out in regulation green uniforms, labour round the year, day and night, making a stupendous range of presents for good boys and girls. The North Pole HQ must be vast. It is, after all, the hub of a highly sophisticated production and smuggling operation (no taxes are paid on all those exports).

There are claims of Father Christmas living in Spragle Bay, near Uummannaq in central west Greenland. That is supposedly “sure and certain”. Locals there call him Juulimaaq (one of many aliases). The entirely fabricated story has Father Christmas occupying a “simple hut”. Even then it is admitted that he has a “large camp” at the North Pole.²⁸ The idea that his elves could do their work in such a diminutive little space is evidently utterly absurd. Santa’s Spragle Bay hut is … well, just a hut. Clearly we are dealing with a desperate marketing attempt by Greenland Travel.²⁹

Nor are claims for Father Christmas running his operation out of Lapland any more convincing. Another marketing ruse surely - this time designed by the Finnish tourist authorities, wanting to generate economic activity in what is a deprived region. Nonetheless, every year, thousands of gullible tourists visit the Rovaniemi “woodland home” of Father Christmas (here he goes under the name of Joulupukki = Christmas goat).³⁰ For that “magical” experience they are charged in excess of £1,240 per adult.³¹ Be warned, it is a con - go at your own risk. The Father Christmas you will meet there is some sad, unemployed actor with false white hair and beard. He is not the real thing and nor are his reindeer. The chances of them flying are zero!

The US postal service gives the Father Christmas HQ address as 123 Elf Road, North Pole, 88888. However, satellite images fail to provide any evidence of roads or buildings at the North Pole. Likely the sprawling complex lies hidden, deep under snow and ice (which, incidentally, global warming is putting at risk - not that we have had any reports of Father Christmas lobbying any of those Cop conferences).

Why the Arctic? No trees, no sunlight for six months, no free labour, but plenty of space and the absence of government regulations limiting hours. And it is very cold: -40ºC. Presumably, though the elves are kept warm, fed and dry, escape is impossible. Out on the desolate ice sheet, 450 miles from the nearest land, they would quickly perish. Then there are the polar bears. Despite that, guards are recruited into North Pole Security from amongst the most trusted elves. They get special rations and various privileges.³² Instinctively, as an autocrat, Father Christmas bans elves from establishing trade unions or forming their own political party. He claims, of course, that they are perfectly content and love working round the clock.

Rumour has it, though, that the North Pole HQ has seen a rash of wildcat strikes in recent years demanding limits on hours and more rations. A small, highly clandestine, group of elves are believed to have been meeting together with the intention of producing a theoretical journal. It will, hopefully, be published next year in Avarin.³³ The proposed masthead is: ‘Down with the tyrant Father Christmas!’ (2yN5 y3B @ 1Ú71Dp e3C6V a7iT1tiEÁ).

There are, however, differences in assessing the political economy of Christmasland ... and, therefore, the road to liberation. Some stress the need to begin with ‘bread and butter’ issues and the recognition that Father Christmas is just another capitalist. He does, after all, ruthlessly exploit the elves. Therefore the key is: ‘Unionisation and elf control over production!’ (5&`B5^iT1D`B5^ 2P jRe z1Np7j^ r^6V q72HzJ1`B5^Á). Others insist that Father Christmas does not exploit the elves: rather he behaves in a manner analogous to the stories coming from the human world about Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Enver Hoxha and the Kim dynasty. Without wage-labour and the exchange of money how can he be a capitalist? Overthrow the hated Claus, though, and then the elves can return to their ancient homelands and their ancient ways. Hence the call: ‘Back to Elfland!’ (wzD; 1`N jRej2#PÁ). Then there are those who emphasise internationalism and say that, while the gift economy of Christmasland is based on slave labour, it is reliant on a whole nexus of hidden subsidies coming from a global capitalism that counts on the ‘spirit of Christmas’ to generate sales and dampen down class antagonisms. They say: ‘Elf slaves and human workers unite!’ (jRe 8jr#iV 2P 9t&5# y6Nz6V8 5&1GÊÁ).

Slavery

Claire Knowles and Adam McGlynn of Acuity Law damningly point out that the way Father Christmas treats the elves stands in violation of the 1926 League of Nations convention on slavery. The convention defined slavery as being the “exercise of any or all powers of ownership over a person”. Two forms of exploitation which may, according to Knowles and McGlynn, “indicate ownership being exercised over elves” are “forced labour and/or controlling their movement (human trafficking)”.³⁴

True, if brought to book, Father Christmas would doubtless plead that elves are not human. A quibble - they are human enough. Many palaeontologists consider them the western branch of Homo floresiensis (which, having migrated out of Africa, some 1.75 million years ago, perhaps the first hominin to do so, finally went extinct in Indonesia just 50,000 years ago).³⁵

Homo elviniensis might only reach an average height of three foot, seven inches and have a brain about the size of a chimpanzee. However, humans and elves have 98.75% of their DNA in common. Moreover, elves have not only developed their own writing system, but literature too. JRR Tolkien claims to have invented the various elvish languages and dialects. Palpable nonsense. Some time in the mid-1920s, he appears to have accidentally stumbled across incredibly rare elvish books of dark magick in the restricted section of the Bodleian Library - since lost or destroyed.

Common in the Middle Ages, elves are nowadays classified as an endangered species. Reportedly though, the recruiting sergeants of Father Christmas still kidnap or lure them from their homelands - Scandinavia, northern Germany and Ireland have been mentioned. However, once they pass through the gates of the Arctic HQ, none have ever returned.

Of course, Father Christmas claims to be the bringer of joy the world over. In the early hours of December 25, under the cover of darkness, Father Christmas assures us that he home-delivers to over half a billion children. One hell of a schedule. On average it amounts to 22 million presents every hour, 360,000 every minute, 6,100 every second.³⁶ All he admits to getting back in return is a mince pie and a nip of sherry from each household.

However, that adds up to an awful lot of mince pies and sherry, so maybe Father Christmas runs a lucrative sideline selling it off? As a sole trader operating outside any national jurisdiction, he keeps his finances a closely guarded secret.

All things considered, it is hardly surprising that many Bible-centred Christians consider Christmas a pagan abomination. Take Father Christmas himself. What does a jolly fat man riding on a sleigh, loaded with toys and pulled along by flying reindeer have to do with the birth of their “son of god”? The answer is - absolutely nothing. Congregations are urged to avoid the temptations of “man-made traditions and holidays”. Instead keep to the feast days and celebrations “observed by Jesus Christ, the apostles and the early Church”.³⁷

To state the obvious, all feast days and celebrations - including the ones observed by Jesus ben Joseph, his brother, James, and his nephew, Simeon - were made by human beings for human beings, and often date back to the earliest of times. As for me, traditional Christmas pudding - with lashings of cream, not custard - that and traditional Christmas ale - are irresistible temptations.

reports.retail-week.com/christmas-forecast-2024/index.html.↩︎
www.insightdiy.co.uk/news/christmas-shoppers-predicted-to-spend-8829bn-this-year/14281.htm.↩︎
www.gohenry.com/uk/blog/family/how-much-to-spend-on-christmas-gifts-per-child.↩︎
web.archive.org/web/20220810171101/weinfluence.co.uk/blog/tis-the-season-to-start-your-christmas-marketing.↩︎
web.archive.org/web/20240528132248/www.civilsociety.co.uk/news/average-ceo-pay-at-large-charities-rises-to-175-000-survey-shows.html.↩︎
Luke ii:14.↩︎
web.archive.org/web/20220527160827/connectassist.co.uk/blog/the-season-of-giving.↩︎
Figure of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day totalled 1,961,000; Easter 938,000 (www.christiantoday.com/article/church.of.england.enjoys.strong.turnout.at.christmas.and.easter.but.attendance.remains.below.pre.pandemic.levels/142429.htm).↩︎
Christianity September 14 2022.↩︎
www.churchofengland.org/about/leadership-and-governance.↩︎
I Bradley God save the queen: the spiritual heart of the monarchy New York NY 2012, p177.↩︎
See A Morton 17 carnations: the Windsors, the Nazis and the cover-up London 2015.↩︎
GA Williamson (trans) Josephus: the Jewish war Harmondsworth 1981, p133.↩︎
Matthew v:10.↩︎
Luke xx:25.↩︎
This “deep well” metaphor is adapted from George Tyrell, a Catholic convert from Anglicanism, who argued in favour of “scientific inquiry”, when it came to Jesus (G Tyrell Christianity at the crossroads London 1910, pp43,44). There are, sadly, many examples of Jesus as self-reflection, including in these pages. Advocating his “impossibilist” call for an Israeli-Palestinian workers’ state, Daniel Lazare called for us to emulate “the internationalist Jesus”: “‘What would Jesus do’ should be our slogan - not in a direct sense, needless to say, but dialectically, so that his yearning for international moral solidarity becomes our own” (D Lazare, ‘An international socialist?’ Weekly Worker December 14 2023: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1471/an-international-socialist).↩︎
Luke xxiii:2.↩︎
Matthew v:39.↩︎
H Maccoby Revolution in Judea London 1973, p163.↩︎
Matthew x,34.↩︎
Judges vii,2.↩︎
Luke xxii:38.↩︎
Matthew xxvi: 53.↩︎
Luke vi,20-25.↩︎
W Wilson (trans) The writings of Clement of Alexandria Vol 1, Edinburgh 1867, p445.↩︎
See A McGowan, ‘How December 25 became Christmas’ Bible Review December 2002.↩︎
theferret.scot/fact-check-coca-cola-red-santa-claus-christmas.↩︎
polarjournal.ch/en/2020/12/24/santa-claus-lives-in-greenland.↩︎
visitgreenland.com/de.↩︎
portal.laplanduk.co.uk/the-experience/father-christmas.↩︎
www.santaslapland.com.↩︎
santaupdate.com/2021/12/17/north-pole-security-hard-at-work.↩︎
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvish_languages.↩︎
acuitylaw.com/elf-labour-the-definitive-legal-answer.↩︎
For detailed science see www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047248417300866; on the hominin being the first out of Africa, see New Scientist April 21 2017; for general coverage see - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_floresiensis.↩︎
www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/12/santas-christmas-eve-workload-calculated/249844.↩︎
www.ucg.org/learn/beyond-today-magazine/beyond-today-magazine-november-december-2018/was-jesus-born-christmas.↩︎