I wrote previously about how the church needed to update their hymn portfolio to appeal to a new target group of punters. Alas, as expected, nothing of note happened and ‘Kumbaya my Lord’ and ‘She’ll be coming round the mountain’ will likely remain in the religious hot top ten for yet another millennium.

The earlier-by-the-year jumping of the gun by those with wares to sell ensured the Yuletide rhymes and tunes were back out in full force as we continued to inadvertently slip a shilling into Noddy Holder’s pension fund.

I heard ‘Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat, please put a penny in the old man’s hat’ the other day and couldn’t help but think how that other bastion of Yuletide: ‘the snowflake’ must be feeling hearing such lyrics, as they remonstrate via the updated millennial version of thwacking a rolled-up copy of the Guardian on a glass-topped coffee table.

I propose therefore in the spirit of the season to re-write said lyrics to appease the easily offended: ‘The winter holidays are coming, the goose is getting big boned, please put a Bitcoin in the elderly person identifying as male’s head receptacle.’ Granted, it has no ring to it, but it ticks all the woke boxes and we must bend a little to appease such fragile sensibilities, mustn’t we?

But is this appeasement, which is now a daily occurrence, really a new phenomenon? I recall at a workplace a decade plus ago receiving a memo dictating that ‘the use of the word ‘Christmas’ is forbidden at work and will now be referred to as the ‘winter celebrations.’

Silly season went on with a diktat that Christmas cards would not be allowed to be openly displayed on desks. To my personal detriment, I find it hard to, how shall we put it, ‘brown nose’ and instead of blindly following the not legally binding workplace order, I instead questioned the edict.

The reasoning was that it ‘might offend non-Christian faith groups.’ I therefore undertook a one-man market research study amongst my many non-Christian friends at the employ, and not one said they opposed the display of cards. To a man (and woman) they decried it as nonsense and correctly stated that ‘all it will do is make Christians think we are against it and are offended, but we aren’t in the slightest.’

So, we move with the times, finding offence where there is none, and the same can be seen with Christmas music. ‘Fairytale of New York’ has been edited because of its use of the word ‘faggot’ which, in the context of the song, is apt and of the age, yet Cardi B (a rapper apparently) has carte blanch to release onto the masses the following ditty, taken from WAP: ‘There’s some whores in the house, Wet A*s Pu**y’ before raising her song writing game and rhyming the words cream and scream.

But alas, with the season now descending in the rear view mirror, there are those that manage to unfortunately escape the cancel cull and keep coming back once the winter nights draw in: take a bow, Chris Rea and ‘driving home for Christmas’, who sang ‘soon they’ll be a freeway, yeah’ which would not fly today as, in his other hit, written about the M25 ring round, and entitled ‘road to hell’ he would be unlikely to get home for Christmas. With the strikes and fuel costs being barriers, he would then have to negate the inevitable group of renegades taking to the motorway gantry’s as they take a break from smearing oil-based paint over grand masters.

On second thoughts, maybe change is needed as much as it ever was. No doubt Mary and Joseph were thrilled to be permitted into a barn all those years ago and, after convincing Joseph an affair hadn’t been had, as Mary lay down to relax after the horrors of the middle-aged childbirth, the three wise men rocked up bearing gifts including myrrh. One cannot help but think the look on her face must have been a picture as we sit here some2,000 years later still confused as to the choice of gift and its apparent usage…

  • Brett Ellis is a teacher