- / Marrakech
IZZA Marrakech, a boutique hotel where architecture, contemporary art, and cultural collaboration redefine sustainable hospitality in the heart of the Medina
ISSUE NO. 31
The juggernaut of festivities takes the throne again. It begins earlier every year. Christmas is filled with obligatory adorations and invocations of a baby born in a manger and the famous old Saint Nicholas, who has a thing for Scarlett but not razor blades. Where snow and big trees litter the public sphere and private realms, and where businesses get so fanatical about the Christmas orthodoxy, you’d half expect a surgeon to hum Jingle Bells while performing an amputation.
Self-ingratiating and steady-handed on the scalpel. Half of the globe has the holiday season during summer, but a white Christmas is still the idyll in the minds of the young — an innocent and optimistic view of a blanketed world that, in reality, keeps warming up. Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” from 1942 might still be the best-selling single in the world, but swims and the sun are increasingly replacing the dream of the snow and sled.
It’s hardly ever a white Christmas anywhere anymore, yet it’s something special we tend to dream about. Most places on Earth have average temperatures above freezing during the Christmas month. Only three of the world’s largest cities have a real chance of snow on Christmas day: Seoul, New York, and Beijing.
It is not an exclusively cold-weather enterprise. It can be fun-packed or lonely, brimming with grins or a steely and unpleasant energy. Stroll around Hawaii, LA, Cape Town, Casablanca or Sydney, and Christmas turns into a sun-kissed, beer-rinsed and heat-wilted vision of barbeques, braaing and seafood towers. Eggnog or Piña colada, Santa? The children crawl over the poor guy in the department store in London while his cousins in the Antipodes swelter under the grinding light of a beachside summer.
Ahh, and the food… enough to feed a stubbornness of rhinos. The dinner, no matter where you are, is the apotheosis of the feast — even if AA Gill found the old-school Christmas dinner to be, “the single most disgusting meal ever invented with the exception of American Thanksgiving.” November can keep the turkey, but sometimes, the war on the stomach makes the day more special, more of a ritual for the community. An albeit bloated shared experience. Organisations open tents in metropolitan city squares to feed the homeless, who still struggle to stay warm wherever they are.
Homelessness and Humanity: will the makeshift tent cities of the world be cold this year?
Where politics are hushed, family politics make for a very visible disquiet. Dorothy Parker dreaded the Christmas magazines with their snowbound trains and ‘Gifts for her’ sections, and over a hundred years later, not much has changed. Christmas is brimming with an image from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, thick with hope, snowmen, and the yearly trauma-dumping from relatives over jolly tidings and tired stockings. Brazilian cities take to cider and street parties, eating turkey and pineapple and rice with raisins. In Sydney, the environment is warm and untidy, sticky and uncomfortable, summery and pickled by warm oceans and oysters and cricket with ice-cold beer.
Don’t forget those who travel to see family stuck next to wailing children in tight-knit coach seats with squawking strangers on the way to squeaking holiday houses. For most people in the Western World, Christmas begins long before December 25. The decorations in the supermarket switch from skulls to great whiskey-nosed deer, and for those in the Southern Hemisphere, it can mean a bunch of prawns and a Surfing Santa with Prosecco and heat-stroked pantomime. In the Northern Hemisphere, it can be cold out and cozy in, and the holiday even involves snow and a lit fireplace, but it can also be bulging with glut. Freezing nights at school halls watching a bunch of theatrics before shuddering past gaudy Christmas lights with a bloated sense of exhaustion a few nights before the snotty children have their favourite day of the year.
Impertinent quotes on odd postcards.
There’s always an aunt asking, “Are you still single?”
No matter where in the world it is practised, there are still Yuletide markets for the kitsch with muddied novelty ties sold on stands, and there will be many lint-stacked Elf outfits pulled out from the old XMAS-marked boxes. Christopher Hitchens called it a collectivisation of gaiety and the compulsory infliction of joy. Smile for the old bearded man as you sit on his lap.
Some work all the way up to Christmas Eve, only to sit on a crowded plane, squeezed between strangers they’ll never see again. Just to get in the door by lunch. Sometimes, people miss it entirely, flying through time zones, skipping the day, and arriving in a world where ‘SALE’ signs cover shopfronts and turgid bin bags nestle next to discarded spruces, supine on the pavement.
The first Christmas tree was put up in the White House in 1889. The trees seem always to be too big for the house, don’t they? A foolish symbol of a conquest over the wilderness. Progress is reconstituting nature in all its plastic decorations.
“I think If God had meant Christmas to be a family occasion, he wouldn’t have invented TV,” said British comedian Rory McGrath. Then again, many people do Christmas alone — Renata Adler said she even got used to it. And in the lead-up to the fateful day, office parties spill out into the streets as suits stack beer cups and get thrown out before supper while summer dresses drown Apero and Margaritas in the jaguar sun. Orwell said, “A deliberately austere Christmas would be an absurdity. The whole point of Christmas is that it is a debauch.”
Moneyed-up yuppies go from Christmas lunch selfies to drunk-calling darlings crouched on curbs, smoking in the sweat and short-skirted heat of the night. It is called the overspill. The office party fallout. The torn festive shirt. The days when the Santa hat covers greased hair, receding hairlines, and one wrong sentence in front of a boss can undo a years-worth of work.
Feigned gratitude and broken baubles. And weird secrets come out.
A week earlier, what feels like everybody is crowding around a big tree. Whole villages build the Nativity Scene. We must all be wrapping presents we were gifted that we didn’t want, or writing cards and receiving cards and opening more presents we don’t want — and then ogling at people in disdain as they open the presents that we wanted — that will probably be regifted next year.
New years resolutions, anyone?
All those annoying romance movies and cliches, the shopping and being nice to people, and the ubiquitous red, green and white of the cities all across the globe. And all that cooking and eating and love and happiness and Merry Merry Merry Merry…
Month? Feels like it. December is the international holy month for shopping (and self-loathing).
A time when the president offers vapid tidings.
Face it, 2024 hasn’t been the best. I wonder if Biden has a sweat-stained shirt as he heaves his belongings out of the Oval Office. Only a ‘ugh ugh ugh’ can be heard coming from the White House this year. The closest thing we have to a new Santa is a toupeed blobfish with cla[we]s and an appetite for selective benefaction. What a jolly endowment!
In an episode of Grumpy Old Men, Rick Stein commented, “There are more aggravating things about Christmas than there are delightful things about Christmas…” Later on, Will Self sets a relatable childhood scene of the humbling ‘food coma’, as “feeble little slippered feet sit twitching in the fetid air,” and all the warm countries drip in the day as they try to stay awake after too much dry turkey and too-rich cranberry sauce. But then again, spending time with friends and family feels pretty nice.
Do people still send Christmas cards via email? — That seems more outdated than the original thing.
Advent calendars are usually consumed before the Nativity unless the dogs get to it first, and receipts fill wallets as presents wait to be returned. Carols breach into the taxi radios with rancid pop records or reggaefied adaptations of a snowy white night in the Caribbean.
Multi-coloured bulb-studded houses with wobbly inflatable Santas reach around suburbs with a tawdry air of trained, fetishised happiness. So much money is spent on electricity bills for these houses you could power all the bathroom AirCon units of the US Navy nuclear submarine fleet.
Patti Smith wrote this in 2023 last year:
We are living in times when so many people are suffering, where there are no Christmas truces, and the way of the pilgrim has been denied. We feel helpless but must maintain our concern for humanity, that is crying out. Cries that I can hear in my heart, even as I cross the street, safe and sound, on my way home.
I wonder if she will say anything new this time around.
Some will be freezing or under fire, and some will smell eucalypts. Christmas time around the world is warm and communal, close and cramped. Like a campsite…or a camp.
Rubble-laden managers and silent processions are happening in too many places. This is the time for release.
The Hafez al-Assad regime in Syria was toppled this month. It took under ten days. Nothing like the smell of changing freedom during the festive season.
A stone’s throw from Bethlehem.
ISSUE NO. 31
Lampoon is a cultural magazine.
Culture today means sustainability – in its honest meaning.
Culture has always been about human respect, tolerance. It’s not only about accepting human diversity but it’s about searching for the beauty of every human peculiarity.
Inclusion is the first value that defines art. Culture today means one thing only: to be part of a community, to think as a community.
Reading Lampoon, you see that these themes are smoothly aligned. A good part of the articles’ content discusses practices to restore our environment and stories about understanding the others.
Reading Lampoon, you find a dialogue between science and creativity. From sharp and edgy photo sessions to fashion, architecture, technology – the commitment is dedicated to a future that is all about us – together.
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