Eratosphere - Competition: Bah Humbug

Competition: Bah! Humbug!
SATURDAY, 18TH DECEMBER 2010
Lucy Vickery resents this week's competition

In Competition No. 2677 you were invited to submit a poem in dispraise of Christmas.

The challenge awakened your inner Scrooge, eliciting a heartfelt chorus of disapproval of all things yule-related. Stoking the anti-Christmas spirit was the prospect of dry, tasteless turkey, grasping, ungrateful children, needle-shedding trees and the torture of office parties — among much else.

Commendations to W.J. Webster, Chris O’Carroll and Shirley Curran. The winners, printed below, get £25 apiece and the festive bonus fiver is Bill Greenwell’s. Happy Christmas!

Turkey gizzard, and a blizzard
Blasting through the bright arcade
(Cliff and Slade and Mud and Wizzard,
The usual claptrap, loudly played):
How I wish I had a hatchet —
Cut the lights and let the dark in,
Chop the tree and stifle Cratchit.
Christmas feeds my inner Larkin.

Season’s knees-ups, Christmas ceilidhs,
Greater greed than pigs in sties,
Pensioners on double Baileys,
Gorging gaily on mince pies:
Each December grows unpleasant
And, before its tide’s receded,
There is one thought ever-present:
Where is Herod when he’s needed?
Bill Greenwell

Cursed be the candles, the crackers, the cake.
Cursed be the tinsel-strewn tree.
Cursed be this festival, hollow and fake.
It means less than nothing to me.

A murrain on Santa, and Rudolph as well.
A pox on the carolling choir.
Bad cess to the cute fairy lights, and to hell
With the blazing Yule log on the fire.

Damn turkey and stuffing and cranberry sauce.
The devil with pud and mince pies.
What, wear paper headgear and eat like a horse?
I’d rather stick pins in my eyes.

Christmas to me is just obsolete, dead,
A clichéd parade of pure corn.
I’ll spend it like most days, alone in my shed
With my cider, my drugs and my porn.
G.M. Davis

They came upon the midnight — clear
As bottled beer I swear,
A band of angels drawing near
And hovering in the air;
‘Fear not!’ they sang, ‘There’s joy in store,
Rejoice, we come to bless,
And sing, Though Christmas comes once more,
Praise be! It comes once less.’

Their song turned misery to cheer
And haplessness to hope,
And now, when Christmas comes each year,
I have the strength to cope
In knowing that I need endure
The press, the mess and stress
Of Yuletide torment, not once more,
But, praise the Lord, once less.
Alan Millard

At Christmas time I wrap up junk
And mutter old religious bunk,
Before becoming very drunk.

At Christmas time my children write
To some old bearded blatherskite
And stay up half the bloody night.

At Christmas time the in-laws come.
They steal my whisky, gin and rum,
Then quarrel with my dad and mum.

At Christmas time I wonder if
I want to singalong with Cliff.
I think I’d rather be a stiff.

At Christmas time my belly vastly
Swells, my temper frays and, lastly,
The weather’s uniformly ghastly.
John Whitworth

Though Christmas comes but once a year,
It hangs around, and rarely stops
Until the mince pies disappear —
When hot cross buns are in the shops.
We lost the plot when Silent Nights
Were heard a week before Guy Fawkes,
And meretricious Christmas lights
Illuminated autumn walks.

Now, is it any wonder that
My Christmas list of hates is huge;
The season leaves me tired and flat,
Yet I’m no Ebenezer Scrooge.
I’ve seen how commerce took command,
And undermined the Christian cause,
So Christmas should, I feel, be banned —
I am, yours truly, Santa Claus.
Bernadette Evans

Peace and goodwill? As if. I know the score.
It’s not just shopping orgies, Roger Moore,
unhealthy food and sentimental cheer
shallow and transient as cheap veneer
that make me dread the season. It’s the role
it casts me in — a glowing, hearty soul,
which I am not. Supposedly benign,
I nod and smile inanely as we dine.
Each slice of tasteless turkey, each mince pie
curdles my gut like swallowing a lie.
Come early-evening TV time I snub
the tribal madness, sneak off to the pub
throw whiskies down till time is called, then, sunk
in seasonal disgust, distempered, drunk,
throw up my dinner in a midnight taxi.
Christmas? You can stick it up your jacksie.
Basil Ransome-Davies