We’ve Cancelled Christmas

Yes, I and my fellow Luton Councillors are so concerned that Christmas, with its pagan symbolism and its stated objective of ramming Christian theology down people’s throats, will offend people of other religions or no religion at all have decided to stop the whole thing. So anyone attempting to celebrate Christmas tomorrow be warned, council officers will confiscate your mince pies.

…er…except we haven’t and we won’t.

Luton has not cancelled Christmas nor have we decided to “change Christmas into a Harry Potter festival by renaming its festive lights ‘Luminos'” as various newspapers have reported. I have watched with increasing frustration as my town has got caught up in one of the most ridiculous media invented moral panics that I think I have witnessed.

I suppose I have become used to the right-wing press, often in collusion with fringe pressure groups, generating these scares every so often, and various commentators and politicians jumping on the bandwagon. So in recent years I have tended to shrug my shoulders and say “there they go again” and ignore the whole thing. But this one actually did wind me up. Mainly because it had virtually no foundation in reality what so ever. The media has spent a huge amount of air time and paper promoting, I suspect often consciously, a story that was almost entirely invented.

There were a few voices crying out “hang on a minute”. I’m particularly grateful to this article in the Guardian which helped put the record straight about Luton’s Luminos;

“Luton does not have a festival called Luminos. It does not use any alternative name for Christmas. When it did, once, five years ago, hold something called Luminos one weekend in late November, the event didn’t even replace the council’s own Christmas celebrations, let alone forbid anyone else from doing anything.”

But with a few exceptions the media seem to have blindly accepted the concept of a “PC Crusade against Christmas”. Yesterday I came across by accident this letter from the Islington Gazzette where a reader reacts against a classic example of this type of nonsense;

“It would appear ‘the political correctness gone mad lobby’ have, er, gone mad!”.

Quite.

Anyway, at the risk of offending you all: Happy Christmas!

This content was originally posted on my old Process Guy blog.