‘I love the baby Jesus. Tremendous guy. Big fan of mine’
The tree is up. The candles are lit. Music and laughter fill the air. With the festive season well and truly upon us, this column asked leading public figures to share their thoughts on what Christmas means to them.
Donald Trump
I love the baby Jesus. Great guy. Tremendous guy. Big fan of mine. Had him over at the Mar-a-lago a couple weeks back. He said, “Donald, you’re doing fantastic. God’s so proud of you. But one thing: make sure you get these enormous tax cuts for billionaires through. Because, like I always say: it is extremely easy for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven. So easy. It’s like a needle passing through the eye of a camel.”
That’s exactly what the baby Jesus said. And I’m just so proud that America is finally getting back to true Christian values.
Paul Mason
How very convenient. Just when the Tories are on the ropes, their old chums at the BBC hastily fill the schedules with wall-to-wall programming about Santa Claus, snow, presents, tinsel and other diversionary rubbish. Look at the listings in the latest Radio Times. It’s all Doctor Who Christmas Special, Strictly Come Dancing Christmas Special, The Great Christmas Bake Off… Pure bread and circuses, cynically calculated to make the masses forget all about the little matter of Damian Green.
I’ll be watching The Queen’s Christmas Broadcast very closely. If she doesn’t lead on Mark Garnier I’m organising a mass protest outside Broadcasting House.
The Department for Exiting the European Union Christmas is an annual festival observed on December
25. It commemorates the birth of Jesus Christ, a central figure in the Christian religion. A popular custom on Christmas Day is the exchanging of gifts. A gift is an item given without the expectation of payment. For lunch on Christmas Day it is traditional to eat turkey. Turkey is a large bird native to the Americas. The Americas are two continents (North America, to the north, and South America, to the south) separated from the United Kingdom by the Atlantic ocean. An ocean is a large body of salt water. Water is a transparent chemical substance that covers 71 per cent of the Earth’s surface. Earth is the planet on which the United Kingdom is located. The United Kingdom is a country whose future prosperity depends on intelligence gleaned by researchers at the Department for Exiting the European Union.
Richard Dawkins
Christmas represents yet further proof of the decline in intellectual rigour among today’s small children. For pity’s sake: there is no empirical evidence of any flying reindeer, let alone one with a red nose. And I’m sorry to have to break it to you, but no, Santa Claus is not “coming to town”, irrespective of whether you pout, cry or otherwise. This planet is home to an estimated two billion children, spread across no fewer than six continents. Are you seriously asking me to believe that, in a matter of mere hours, a single elderly man is capable of delivering presents to each and every one of those children, no matter how many supernatural airborne fauna he has at his disposal?
Learn to think critically.
Julian Assange
You’ll never read it in the mainstream media. But this email tells you all you need to know.
From: Hillary Clinton
To: Santa Claus
Dear Santa,
My name is Hillary and I am 70 years old and I live in New York, United States of America. This year I have been a very good girl. For Christmas I would like:
• War
• Blood
• Money
• Sleaze
• The completely innocent Julian Assange, Editor-in-chief of Wikileaks, to be imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit because we, the Establishment, feel threatened by the heroic way he exposes the corruption of the rich and powerful, without exception.
Love from
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Stop asking me why I don’t release Trump and Putin’s letters to Santa. They didn’t write any. And anyway, they were completely above board.
A small quandary. Every December, two or three Christmas cards arrive that aren’t for us. They’re addressed to the previous owners of our house – who moved away more than three years ago.
We never know what to do with the cards. If it were any other form of post, we could write “Not at this address, return to sender” on the envelope. But with a Christmas card, we just can’t bring ourselves to do it. Whether the postman would actually succeed in returning a card, I don’t know, but I wouldn’t want him to. Imagine how you’d feel, as the sender, when it dropped through your letterbox.
You’ve sent a Christmas card to an old friend, one you haven’t seen so much of lately, just to let them know you’re still thinking of them. A nice little gesture. A hint that you’d like to catch up sometime. And then your card comes back, returned to sender – and you realise that your old friend thinks so little of you, they didn’t even bother to let you know they’d moved.
The kindest thing, I suppose, is to slip the cards in the bin.
The accidental poetry of toddlers: Christmas edition.
The other morning I was walking my three-year-old son to nursery. We set off into the bright and biting cold. The grass was silver. The pavements sparkled. The roads glittered.
My son turned round in his pushchair.
“Dada,” he said earnestly. “The ground is covered in Frosties!”