I’ll deal with Christmas in due time!

Because there may well be shortages in the shops come December – and even with on-line shopping – some prudent folks already have all their Christmas shopping, bar last-minute food, arranged, wrapped, and ready to deliver.

A late Thanksgiving interrupted the space for Christmas shopping”

There has been a world-wide disruption of supply chains, largely, but not wholly, due to Covid: tankers have been held up everywhere from California to the Suez canal with their stacked containers. And there’s a shortage of delivery truckies too.

Yet shopping early for Christmas isn’t new: an American retail conglomerate started it all in 1936, when they got President Roosevelt to move Thanksgiving to an earlier date in November so as to give consumers time to “shop early for Christmas”. A late Thanksgiving interrupted the space for Christmas shopping.

Modern times have gone one better, by linking “Black Friday” with the Thanksgiving harvest festival – a fiesta of shopping opportunities and offers of special bargains.

We shouldn’t be overly puritanical about the “commercialisation” of Christmas, it seems to me: shopping cheers people up, and shopping for gifts for other people helps to spread kindness and altruism. And those in the prudent school of Christmas preparations say that an early start in Christmas preparations helps them make more thoughtful choices.

Sensible people

The really sensible people have their Christmas arrangements all sorted by October, if not September – which expands the shopping-and-gifting Christmas into a quarter of the year.

I’m not of the plan-ahead school here. Except for assembling a few Christmas cards, I leave my Christmas plans well into December. Partly because I think we should mark Advent – starting on 28 November – before we start getting into Christmas mode.

And partly because I feel we should try and live each day as it comes to us, and not be constantly focused on planning forward.

If the shops are emptier because the logistics are still entangled, well, I’ll accept it, and make do”

When I first attended an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting I voiced the anxiety that I’d never be able to get through Christmas without a few drinks. “Don’t focus on Christmas. Focus on today,” I was told. The veteran mentor added cheerfully “you could have fallen under a bus by Christmas!”

So I’ll deal with Christmas, practically speaking, when it starts to arrive. If the shops are emptier because the logistics are still entangled, well, I’ll accept it, and make do.

***

One of our finest historians, J.J. Lee wrote that Ireland “was never a theocracy”. Malachi O’Doherty, who wrote a critical history of Catholic Ireland, also wrote that Ireland had never been a theocracy. Garret Fitzgerald said that Church and state in Ireland were more properly separated than in most other European countries.

Yet the influential Fintan O’Toole continues to refer to “theocratic Ireland”, and in this, he has many imitators. We know the Catholic Church was powerful – sometimes too powerful – but still, the Irish state was not a theocracy.

English is the modern lingo

Some commentators have suggested that “Climate Change Activism” is a new religion, and that Greta Thunberg is its Joan of Arc.

I hope not. Responsible environmentalism is admirable, but it is not a religious faith.

But what is so striking about Swedish Greta is her extraordinarily fluent grasp of English. She isn’t a native English speaker, and yet to hear her chatter away so articulately, you might think she was a born Anglophone. Only very occasionally do you catch a little Scandinavian inflection.

I’m told by a Swedish-speaking friend that English is linguistically accessible for Swedes – look at ABBA, who found it natural to sing in English. There is even a linguistic cocktail known as “Swinglish” – a mixture of Swedish and English.

The Swedes and the other Nordics were influential in making English a dominant working language in the EU. Which gives the Irish a great advantage – being native English-speakers (along with Malta, arguably).

If our dear Gaelgoirí campaigners – including Eamon de Valera – had succeeded we wouldn’t be speaking English at all!

Irish, as a language, should be a labour of love, and a portal to the great Irish Christian civilisation of the past. But English, as Greta demonstrates, is the modern lingo of communication.

***

Twenty-three million people in Afghanistan are now facing, not just hunger, but devastating famine. A drought has literally dried up agriculture and food is desperately scarce. Women on their own – especially widows with children – are particularly vulnerable. Political inhibitions about negotiating with the Taliban are apparently an obstacle to relief and aid.

Surely rescuing victims of famine should be the priority – not the politics of the situation?

The Americans left over $80 billion worth of military hardware behind in that country when President Biden so hastily withdrew in August. Contrast the astronomical sums spent on weaponry with the plight of so many people starving.