Essays in Idleness

A very Merry Christmas, especially to those Christians, Jews, and sympathetic others who face the “holiday season” on their own — when even those with surviving family must endure a passive-aggressive “toleration.” Christmas has become a time of division, with scarring along political lines. The joyousness of the festival is replaced by aggressively anti-Christian virtue signalling on the one side, while commercialism corrupts it on the other. Too often, the professional class of religious leaders betray us with their concessions to Woke.

We live in a time when, in Canada for instance, many dozen churches have been burned to the ground, and dozens more vandalized, in a criminal response to an entirely fabricated story of ancestral genocide (of Indians fancifully slain in residential schools), promoted by our government-subsidized, profoundly wicked national media. Our flags flew at half-mast for the better part of a year, by way of saluting this media lie; and our university-educated young still march for it and for such other causes as the actual genocide committed by Hamas. We have achieved, in time for Christmas 2023, a degree of shamelessness that is unprecedented.

The same pattern repeats elsewhere: media narratives constructed from lies, and an educational establishment that installed them in the first place; a touchy “liberal” ruling class that has perpetuated itself in government bureaucracies, and expropriated the rule of law.

And we have become accustomed to it. A shrinking minority still capable of human decency, without being oppressively monitored, must train themselves to ignore the provocations.

To be witness to Truth is a calling more important than to be the beneficiary of social approval and family cuddliness. The celebration of Christmas, before Canada ceased to be a Christian country, may fade in our memory; but the reality of family — of the Holy Family and of the Nativity — is, absurdly enough, still vividly remembered.

We cannot wish for trends, or even for the reversal of trends; such optimism is as shallow as pessimism, and as easily dismissed. Hope, rather, is the transcendent religious virtue. It is Hope in the recognition, of God.

And in the presence of that Godly act of “reaching out,” to us in all our apparent hopelessness, it is absurdly Merry.