Joyeux Noël

And we find ourselves in December once again. By my reckoning it happens at least once a year. Perhaps it’s the dwindling sunlight where the grey skies with the fact that I have to trudge everywhere through slop and snow with cold feet. More likely it’s the fact I have to venture into malls that I avoid most of the year — to find they are even more frightening in December than they are the other 11 months. I push myself past the pain until I am exhausted then wander wearily home again.

And then there is the music piped in through the public address system the mall. Sentimental music. Music I remember from growing up: songs about snowmen and snowflakes and fat guys in red suits. All designed to make me buy, buy, BUY!

And Christmas films. The film I recommend is Joyeux Noël (Merry Christmas). I don’t actually enjoy it that much — but I’ve seen it several times by now. It lacks the sentimentality of Frank Capra. And Hallmark has not gotten its claws into it. It is a fictional story based on true events — the 1914 Christmas Armistice.

The setting (SPOILER ALERT!) Is the trench warfare of World War I. The snow is falling and a few soldiers start to sing Christmas carols — among them “Silent Night”. The soldiers on the other side here the tune and recognize it and join in. The result is a spontaneous cease-fire launched not by the leadership but by the front lines. In the end good order reasserts itself — the military and the church collude with one another in much the same way religion and the state collude in the execution of Jesus 2000 years ago. And so the church murders the human connection — it crushes the life out of Christmas — for the sake of maintaining the status quo; for the sake of reinforcing the authority structures of their societies; in order to reinforce the right and the responsibility of the state to kill and to order its citizens to kill on its behalf.