Can you believe what the woke brigade want to do with Christmas?

All these snivelling snowflakes trying to sully tradition and language with their right on identity politics. Now they’re coming for Christmas. Well, not this year. Not on my watch

Well, here it is… Merry Christmas! Is everybody having fun?

I should bloody well hope so. After all, we’re lucky to have made it to the festive period at all.

No, I’m not going all toxic positivity and gratitude journal on you, I’m talking about the woke crowd’s dastardly attempts to ban Christmas. Again.

At the start of the month, the University of Brighton was allegedly giving it all, “don’t mention Christmas!” and even Maria off of Corrie suggested that the Weatherfield Christmas markets should be renamed the “winter markets”.

I know, I couldn’t believe it either. Yes, Maria Connor – hairdresser and now local councillor, married to the unfortunately named Gary Windass on-screen and that dead fit bloke from Dancing On Ice off-screen – has been infected by the woke mob. When she’s not trying to take the Christ out of Christmas, she’s fighting to develop a scheme to rehome refugees. She’s turned into Greta Thunberg but with scissors and a mega-can of Freeze ‘n’ Hold.

Honestly, at this stage the world’s turned into a scene from Night of the Living Dead when those infected by the woke virus menace the streets and the remaining sentient souls have to scrap to avoid contamination.

All these snivelling snowflakes trying to sully tradition and language with their right on identity politics. Now they’re coming for Christmas. Well, not this year. Not on my watch.

I say “this year”, but of course I mean “every year”. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it’s become an annual tradition to kick off the Yuletide celebrations with a flurry of pearl clutching about the imperilment of Christmas. Like an out-of-date mince pie, it just keeps repeating on us.

Over the past decade we’ve seen dismay at the banning of nativities, consternation at children’s lack of understanding of the religious significance of the Christian festival, baby Jesus replaced with a Greggs sausage roll and this year we’ve witnessed a collective attack of the vapours about attempts to cancel Christmas: a minor moral panic that came hot on the heels of the 2021 Census results that showed Christianity was no longer the majority religion in England and Wales.

Despite evidence that cancel culture doesn’t seem to have cancelled anyone successfully, we were worried for the ghost of Christmas future.

If Christianity is on the decline then surely Christmas’s days are numbered? I’m almost sobbing into my Baileys at the very thought of it. Specialists in religion told us that the number of people identifying as non-religious has been increasing steadily for years and the Census results reflect an established pattern – and Christmas remains very much on the cultural menu.

But… experts, eh? What do they know? Bunch of nerds who stayed at school instead of getting a proper job. The ones who really know what’s going on – the ones who haven’t spent decades of their life dedicated to research – tutted and shook their heads while attending the nativities that were supposed to be banned in 2014, where the youngest generation played out the Christian story of the virgin birth of Christ (you know the one: it’s the story that young people don’t know about anymore).

Yes, the Census data added an extra frisson of frenzy to the “Christmas is banned” brigade’s annual outing. The news that England is no longer a Christian majority country sparked lamentation and outrage across the nation. For a religion that’s so deeply entrenched in the political infrastructure of the country, it’s remarkably fragile.

Luckily, we’ve managed to snatch the festive period from the jaws of the cancellation crowd. Phew! It was a close call – for a while there it was all looking a bit 1647.

Have the woke crowd been around that long? No, in the 17th century, Oliver Cromwell banned Christmas. And yet Christmas is still here. For a religious festival that’s been under attack since the 1600s, it isn’t half resilient.

Could it be that these annual moral panics about Christmas are actually… overstated? Could it be that they’re more than a touch exaggerated and that Christmas isn’t really at risk of being cancelled at all?

In Coronation Street, art mirrored life. Maria Connor’s pragmatic suggestion that the seasonal market should be renamed because it runs past the Christmas period was misrepresented to the press in a cynical attempt by a disgruntled colleague to undermine the councillor.

Similarly, criticisms of claims of the University of Brighton’s staff guidance around Christmas form part of broader attempt to brand institutions of Higher Education as snowflake farms, where Christmas is cancelled along with free speech.

Anyone who actually read the guidance, which doesn’t seem to include many of those reporting on it, would have seen that far from being an anti-Christmas/Christian diktat, it was pretty underwhelming. It was just gentle encouragement to staff to be mindful that their institution is an international space with a diverse student body.

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting tired of these constant bad faith attempts to misrepresent cultural diversity as an assault on Christmas. There’s no “ban” on Christmas. No attack on tradition. No attempt to “cancel” Christianity. Just wishes for peace, love and understanding.

Merry Christmas!