The commentators                    23-12-14

...on Christmas

With the passing of time the goodwill and good cheer that Christmas is intended to foster is all too often outweighed by the stress and anxiety it causes. The preparations for Christmas are more than joyless; they are soul-destroying. There is frenzy in the air, and it can’t be attributed to philanthropy. The people fighting in department stores on Black Friday were not looking for nice presents for their children, but were being driven by some kind of mindless greed. With the original purpose of Christmas now widely forgotten, new festive symbols, such as TV commercials, have had to be invented. Christmas has become like Winston Churchill’s rejected pudding; it has no theme. We used to look back wistfully to when Christmas was celebrated as a religious festival. Then we looked back to a time when television programmes were more decorous and commercialism less frantic. Soon, maybe, we will be thinking of the old days of jolly old Santa Claus. But there seems no doubt that Christmas will survive, though in quite what form it is hard to know. 
- Alexander Chancellor, The Spectator
Mehdi Hasan
If Mary and Joseph tried to reach Bethlehem today, they would get stuck at an Israeli checkpoint. How would that carpenter and his pregnant wife have circumnavigated the Kafka­esque network of Israeli settlements, roadblocks and closed military zones in the occupied West Bank? Would Mary have had to experience labour or childbirth at a checkpoint, as one in ten pregnant Palestinian women did between 2000 and 2007? The biblical birthplace of Christ has had large chunks of land confiscated and colonised and its tourism-dependent economy has been hit hard. As a result, Christians continue to emigrate from one of the holiest places of Christianity – the Christian proportion of Bethlehem’s population has dropped, in recent decades, from 95 per cent to less than a third. So here is another question to consider: why is it that the plight of persecuted Christians in the Middle East, or countries such as Sudan, has attracted the attention and anger of politicians in the west, yet the Christians of Palestine don’t get a look-in? 
- Mehdi Hasan, New Statesman
This antagonism between Christmas and economics should come as no surprise: this is, after all, the time of year when rational behaviour is supposed to be beside the point. However, this does raise the question: what if, rather than applying the rules of economics to Christmas, one tried to ask what Christmas could teach economists?
- Ed Conway, The Times
This antagonism between Christmas and economics should come as no surprise: this is, after all, the time of year when rational behaviour is supposed to be beside the point. However, this does raise the question: what if, rather than applying the rules of economics to Christmas, one tried to ask what Christmas could teach economists?
- Patti Waldmeir, Financial Times
Men with machine guns set out on a mission. They are heading for a school where they intend to kill as many pupils as they can. They achieve their aim with a death toll of 132 children - and a teacher is burnt alive for good measure. 
By any yardstick this is a big story. But not, to judge from today's front pages, as big as the NHS populating hospital wards with foreign nurses or slightly cheaper petrol. Indeed, the possibility of life on Mars is more compelling for the Telegraph than the real loss of life on Earth.
What is the thinking here?
- Editor's blog 
Tuesday 25 November  The Editorial Intelligence Comment Awards were announced at a breakfast ceremony this morning. David Aaronovitch was named Commentariat of the Year and his newspaper, The Times, won the award for the best comment pages. Stevie Spring, who led the judges, made it a hat-trick for the Times by choosing Melanie Reid for the chairman's award.
The FT, Guardian, Mail and Sunday Times each picked up two awards. SubScribe was also among the winners. You can see the full list of awards here. A video of the presentations will be posted online later. 
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