[John Whitworth]

Chris O'Carroll performed for the Sphere with a very fine effort, I thought. Bill Greenwell and Jerome Betts just failed to get the cigar.

Now all of you must have a verse in your locker for this one. I know I have.

No. 2677: BAH HUMBUG!
You are invited to provide a poem in dispraise of Christmas (16 lines maximum). Please email entries to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 8 December.

[John Whitworth]

And this is it!

Bah Humbug

Hark the Herod Angels shriek
Bloody kids right through the week.
Children are the Christmas curse;
Ours are ghastly, yours are worse.
Kids are snotty, kids are smelly,
Kids watch yards of Christmas telly.
Hark the Herod Angels wail
Christmas is beyond the pale.

Hark the Herod Angels scream
Christmas is a horrid dream.
In the bathroom, on the stair,
Brawling brats are everywhere,
Making an appalling racket,
Smashing toys that cost a packet.
Hark the Herod Angels yell
Kiddikins are Christmas Hell.

[Gail White]

My sentiments about kids, exactly.

My own favorite anti-Christmas quotation is a prose one, and comes from George Bernard Shaw:

"Christmas is forced on a reluctant and disgusted nation by the shopkeepers and the press; on its own merits it would wither and shrivel in the fiery breath of universal hatred, and anyone who looked back to it would be turned into a pile of greasy sausages."

[ChrisGeorge]

Very fine, John and Gail. Enjoyed your poem, John. Also the Scroogian statement from GBS, Gail -- thanks for posting it!

Chris

[John Whitworth]

What! No more humbuggery? Here's another.


Bah Humbug

At Easter time the angel said
That Christ had risen from the dead
And Satan and his minions fled.

At Christmas time the angel told
How living Christ was bought and sold
For many times his weight in gold.

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

At Christmas time the in-laws come
To drink my whisky, gin and rum
And quarrel with my dad and mum.

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

[Jerome Betts]

Well, you're hard to compete with as usual, John, and I'm just off to the Himalaya (restaurant) for some Nepalese winter-warming soup, but off the top of my brain . . .

[basil ransome-davies]

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.

[Roger Slater]

"Keep the 'Christ' in Christmas,"
you say. I say to you,
"Take the 'Christ' from Christmas,
and take the 'mas' out too."

Eliminate the carols.
Remove the ho ho ho's.
Spare the lovely evergreens.
Extinguish Rudolph's nose.

But leave behind the part I like,
the holiday's main payoff:
let each December twenty-fifth
remain a sacred day off.

[John Whitworth]

I was just about to remark that Christmas misanthropy seems a British thing, and up pops Roger to prove me wrong.

[Jayne Osborn]

Thanks for introducing me to 'blatherskite', John; I'd never heard of it.
What a truly wonderful word. I absolutely love it!

And I love your poem, though I think the first two stanzas are a bit redundant.