Wishing a Merry Midwinter to all my readers!
Santa on the cross*
An image to horrify, amaze –
such a mixing up of concepts
we’ve grown up with for so long
but, after all, not necessarily so wrong.
Old stories, myths and fairy tales,
have been distorted every way,
taken from the memories
of former tribes and families.
For a century and more
they’ve served to sell another line,
to hang our dreams out on display
and, to satisfy our hunger, make us pay.
In the North in winter we need light
to get us through the darkness of that night
and so we celebrate, as best we may
with fire and food and drink, the shortest day.
But the pushers who control the world
use every kind of trick they know
to ensure that we consume their junk
and spend all of our dough.
So it is not that strange at all
that in one shopping mall
the management mistakenly
hung Santa on an Easter tree.
rs 19.12.17
[* It was outside a store in Japan and told by an Icelandic story-teller on BBC Radio 4]