Syrians cancel Christmas festivities in solidarity with Gaza
Damascus (AFP) – Christmas cheer has deserted the streets of Syria's cities, where the main churches have limited celebrations to prayers in solidarity with Palestinians suffering war in Gaza.
Issued on: 24/12/2023
"In Palestine, the birthplace of Jesus Christ, people are suffering," the Syriac Catholic Archbishop of Aleppo, Mor Dionysius Antoine Shahda, told AFP.
The northern Syrian city's central district of Azizia is usually home to a bustling festive market and a huge Christmas tree, while its streets are adorned with lights and trinkets.
But this year, the main square is almost empty and there are no Christmas decorations in sight.
"In Syria we cancelled all official celebrations and receptions in our churches in solidarity with the victims of the bombing on Gaza" by Israeli forces, Shahda said.
The Syriac Catholic Church was not alone, with the leaders of three of Syria's major churches -- the Greek Orthodox, Syriac Orthodox and Melkite Greek Catholic patriarchs -- announcing they were cancelling Christmas festivities and limiting celebrations to religious ceremonies.
"Given the current circumstances, especially in Gaza, the patriarchs apologise for not receiving Christmas and New Year greetings," the trio said in a joint statement, adding they were limiting ceremonies to "prayers".
The health ministry in the Hamas-ruled Palestinian territory says more than 20,000 people have been killed in the Gaza Strip since Israel launched its massive air and ground offensive, in response to a deadly attack on southern Israel on October 7.
Most of the dead in Gaza are women and children, officials say.
The Hamas attack killed about 1,140 people in Israel, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.
Many Gazans have been displaced by the violence and forced into crowded shelters or tents, often struggling to find food, fuel, water and medical care.
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees has said the ongoing Israeli military campaign left no safe place anywhere across the narrow territory.
'No opportunity for joy'
Before Syria's civil war erupted in 2011, it was home to more than 1.2 million Christians, though huge numbers have fled since.
The conflict had dampened Christmas celebrations, but festivities picked up in recent years as the main front lines froze and government forces retook control of large swathes of the country.
Still, gloom now prevails in the streets of the capital Damascus.
Festivities are limited to a lone market, while the Greek Orthodox Mariamite Cathedral in Damascus has put up modest decorations and a small tree in its courtyard.
Damascus resident Rachel Haddad, 66, said she had been glued to her phone for more than two months, reading news of the devastation in Gaza, and did not have the heart to put up a Christmas tree.
"This year was very sad. It began with the earthquake and ended with the Gaza war," Haddad said, referring to the February 6 tremor that ripped through southern Turkey and Syria, killing at least 55,000 people.
"There was no opportunity for joy," she said, also blaming Syria's economic woes.
The country's economy has been battered by war, with recurrent fuel shortages and long, daily power cuts a fact of life.
"If there is no electricity, how will you see the decorations and lights anyway?" Haddad asked.
© 2023 AFP
Many Ukrainians will on Monday celebrate Christmas Day on December 25 for the first time, after the government changed the date from the Orthodox Church observance of January 7 in a snub to Russia. Ukraine passed a law in July moving the celebration to December 25, the day when most of the Christian world marks Christmas.
Issued on: 24/12/2023
By:NEWS WIRES
The law signed by President Volodymyr Zelensky noted that Ukrainians wanted to "live their own life with their own traditions and holidays".
It allows them to "abandon the Russian heritage of imposing Christmas celebrations on January 7", it added.
Christianity is the largest religion in Ukraine, with the Russian Orthodox Church dominating religious life until recently.
Like the Russian Church, most eastern Christian churches use the Julian calendar, dating back to Roman times, rather than the Gregorian calendar used in everyday life.
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The date change is part of hastened moves since the invasion to remove traces of the Russian and Soviet empires, such as renaming streets and removing monuments.
The Orthodox Church of Ukraine, a newly created independent church that held its first service in 2019, has also changed its Christmas date to December 25.
It formally broke away from the Russian Orthodox Church over Moscow's annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its support for separatists in eastern Ukraine.
The political rift has seen priests and even entire parishes swap from one church to another, with the new Orthodox Church of Ukraine growing fast and taking over several Russia-linked church buildings in moves supported by the government.
The historically Russia-linked Ukrainian Orthodox Church, meanwhile, is keeping the January 7 Christmas date. This church claims to have cut ties with Russia because of the war but many Ukrainians view this with scepticism.
The country's third Orthodox denomination, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, will also hold Christmas services on December 25.
Ukraine had been under Moscow's spiritual leadership since the 17th century at the latest.
Under the Soviet Union and its profession of atheism, Christmas traditions such as trees and gifts were shifted to New Year's Eve, which became the main holiday and still is for many families.
Ukrainian Christmas traditions include a dinner on Christmas Eve with 12 meatless dishes including a sweet grain pudding called kutya, and people decorate homes with elaborate sheaves of wheat called didukhy.
In some areas, children go from house to house singing carols called kolyadky and performing nativity scenes.
(AFP)
Santa Claus and the Contradictions of Bourgeois Ideology
A comrade recently pointed my attention to a comedy skit by Foil Arms and Hog called “Santa is Captured by the Russians,” where for two minutes Mr. Claus is interrogated by the Soviet police. Below are some excerpts from the conversation:
Santa: I think there has been some sort of a mistake. You see I have a very busy night tonight.
Soviet Police 1: He was found attempting to hide in a chimney.
Soviet Police 2: Chimney? What were you doing in Russian airspace?
Santa: I’ve already told you…
(Santa gets slapped): Ho, ho, ho… That was naughty.
Soviet Police: We found a list of names.
Santa: Ah my list.
Soviet Police: These are American spies?
Santa: No, no…
Soviet Police: There was also a second list.
Santa: Oh you don’t want to be on that list.
Soviet Police: You plan to kill these people.
Santa: No, no, they just get a bad present… It used to be a bag of coal… but the whole climate change thing…
Soviet Police: We intercepted a communication from one of his assets.
“Dear Santa, I have been a good girl. I would like a Silvanian Family Cosy Cottage Starter Home.”
Soviet Police: This is clearly code.
Santa: No it’s not code.
Soviet Police: Then who is Santa?
Santa: That’s me.
Soviet Police: You said your name was Father Christmas.
Santa: Yes, I’m known by very many names.
Soviet Police: So you are spy?… How do you know my children’s names?… What are you doing in Russia?
Santa: Presents, I deliver presents.
Soviet Police: Presents? For who?
Santa: Well, to all the children in the world.
Soviet Police: All the children in the world? In return for what?
Santa: Well, nothing.
Soviet Police: Nothing? So…You are communist?
Santa: Da (Yes)… Why do you think I wear red comrade?
Soviet Police: Signals to officer outside “Comrade, two vodka, one cookies and milk.”
This captures wonderfully the gap between reality and the values and narratives enunciated by the liberal capitalist world. Father Christmas is said to be this selfless gift-bringer, someone who enjoys seeing the smile on kids’ faces as they receive – assuming they weren’t naughty – their new toys. Santa Claus gives, in the traditional narrative, to all kids, irrespective of class (but especially the poor), race, nationality, and sex. He gives these gifts, most importantly, for free. He does not give in exchange for money. His purpose, telos, is not profit. He gives gifts to meet the playful needs of children. His goal is social good, not capital accumulation. He gives so that kids can play, so that they may fulfill what it means to be a kid. He does not give so that parents’ pockets are hollowed, and his North Pole bank account inflated.
Santa Claus’s logic is completely antithetical to the capitalist system. A system premised on producing for the sake of capital accumulation and not social and common good is in contradiction with Father Christmas’s telos. Both the real St. Nicholas (270 – 342 AD) and the Santa Claus we consume in popular culture gift-give without any attempt at obtaining recognition. Unlike the charities in the capitalist West, Santa’s giving does not afford him major tax deductions, and neither does it boost his ‘humanitarian philanthropist profile’ through large, broadcasted events. Saint Nicholas’s giving was not some big spectacle, quite the opposite. He climbs in through the chimney when everyone is sleeping to leave gifts and go. He stands on the side of the poor and does his part in attempting to bring about social justice.
While this is the dominant narrative we operate with, the reality of our commodified Christmas, and of Santa Claus as the personified agent of such commodification, is directly opposed to the narrative itself. As Valerie Panne notes, modern capitalist Christmas has turned Santa Claus into a “decorative marketing tool…for hysterical shopping.” Santa’s commodified image – first used by Coca-Cola in the 1930s – has become instrumental in helping the capitalists realize profit. He has become an instrument used to, as Marx notes in volumes two and three of Capital, “cut the turn over time of capital… The shorter the period of turnover, the smaller this idle portion of capital as compared with the whole, and the larger, therefore, the appropriated surplus-value, provided other conditions remain the same.”
Here we see a clear gap in the enunciated values and the reality of capitalist society. At the ideological level, that is, at the level of how we collectively think about the story and figure of Santa Claus, we find heartwarming values of empathy, selfless giving, and community. However, this ideological level is rooted in the reality of a Santa Claus used to promote conspicuous consumption (as Thorstein Veblen notes), the commodification of family time, traditions, and relations, and the accumulation of capital in the hands of the few.
The ideological reflection of the real world provides an upside-down, topsy-turvy image of itself. This is the essence of bourgeois ideology qua false consciousness. It is a social order that necessitates the general acceptance of an inverted understanding of itself. We come to erroneously understand the “capitalist” Santa through the narratives of the “communist” Santa. Reality is turned on its head. But this is not, as Vanessa Wills notes, a problem of “epistemic hygiene”. The root of the ‘error’ is not in our minds, that is, in our reflection of the objective phenomena at hand. As I’ve argued previously, “it is much deeper than this; the inversion or ‘mistake’ is in the world itself… This world reflects itself through an upside-down appearance, and it must necessarily do so to continuously reproduce itself.” As Marx and Engels noted long ago,
If in all ideology men and their relations appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.
To understand the gap between how Santa Claus (or Christmas) is understood and how it actually functions in modern capitalist society it is insufficient to see the problem simply as one of subjective ‘misunderstandings’ held by individuals, classes, or whole peoples. One must investigate the political economy which grounds, that is, which reflects that erroneous image of itself. The gap between the actual “capitalist” Santa and the ideological “communist” Santa is objective, it is required by the existing material relations of social production and reproduction. Capitalist ideology must disguise the cut-throat values of bourgeois individualism with the universalist values of Santa’s socialistic humanism.
But this is nothing new. Santa Claus is just another particular instant of a universal bourgeois phenomenon. The capitalist class has never been able to fully realize, to make actual, the values it enunciates with its appearance in the arena of universal history as a dominant force. Its universal appeals to liberty, equality, fraternity, etc. have always been limited within the confines of their class. As Marx had already noted in 1843, “the practical application of the right of liberty is the right of private property;” “the necessary condition for whose existence,” he and Engels write in 1848, “is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.” The phrasing of ‘all men’ used to formulate rights under capitalism is always with the understanding, as Marx notes, of “man as a bourgeois,” it is “the rights of the egotistic man, separated from his fellow men and from the community.” Its values, and their reflection in their judicature, always present their narrow class interests embellished by abstract language used to appeal to the masses and obtain their consenting approval for a form of social life which they’re in an objectively antagonistic relation with.
The ideologues of the bourgeoisie always provide the masses with a “bad check,” as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would say. But eventually, as King notes, the masses will come in to cash that check somehow. They’ll notice that within the confines of the existing order, the prosperity that checked promised is unrealizable. Capitalism has never, and will never, fulfill the universal values it pronounces as it breaks out of the bonds of feudal absolutism. Only socialism can.
The values embedded in the narrative surrounding Santa Claus, Father Christmas, Saint Nicholas, or whatever else you want to call him, will never be actual within capitalist society. Only socialism can universalize the form of selfless relationality we have come to associate with Santa.
Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy instructor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2024). Read other articles by Carlos.
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