‘I wish it could be Christmas every day,’ sang Roy Wood of Wizzard, perhaps thinking of the royalty cheques he’d be receiving if he could make that a reality. One Christmas a year not enough for your bank manager, Roy?
I don’t think Wood really thought it through. If it was Christmas every day, then most of the shops would be shut and none of the online stores would be delivering. How would we buy presents for each other? Or food? How would any of us earn the money required to keep this celebration of gluttony and excess going?
Perhaps we could work out some kind of delivery system, where an unfit old bearded man on a magic sleigh could bring the necessary stuff to every single person on the planet in a single night. There’s no doubt that would work for one day a year, but if he had to do it daily then the workload would surely kill him. We could make his appearance so generic that he could be easily replaced by any tubby white-haired pensioner in a red suit – but could we really justify the Santa slaughter?
A never-ending Yuletide would have a terrible effect on agriculture. Every farmer would need to dedicate their land to rearing turkeys and growing sprouts, parsnips, carrots and potatoes and nothing else. As it is, ten million turkeys are sold in Britain every Christmas, so for a daily turkey meal we’d need more than three and a half billion birds a year. They’d fill every park, garden and street corner.
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