There are those who would say that a Christmas without football is simply shopping, meat and an argument
Christmas is ? obviously ? terrible. In fact Christmas is so terrible the only interesting thing about this observation is the follow-up question of exactly how it got so terrible in the first place. In my opinion this state of terrible-ness is the result of recent decisive victories in the struggle between Christmas's two dominant figures: Santa Claus and Jesus Christ.
Basically, Jesus is taking a battering out there.
I'm not talking about the old pre?modern Jesus here: Victorian Jesus, who was strident, militant ? frankly, a bit, you know, Christian ? and who to be fair had a lot of success in his time. I'm talking about recent Jesus, 1970s Jesus, essentially a nice bearded man who plays the guitar and believes in recycling and coffee shop book-share schemes and who doesn't even particularly believe in God, except maybe as a kind of vague force like the internet or trance music.
It is this mild, fair-trade Jesus who has been absolutely turned over in recent years by the bellowing alpha male in the red-suited corner, the decidedly dubious figure of Santa Claus, with his fundamentalist consumerism, his sweatshop values, his great sagging sack crammed with plastic tat, his bellowing contagion of appetite. Right now Santa is dominating, marching Jesus around the car park in a half-nelson, scragging him by the dreadlocks, flinging presents, swigging Drambuie, spraying that thin white kindly neck with the hot spittle of his booming ho, ho, hos.
Happily, though, Christmas isn't alone in these struggles. Perhaps Christmas may even take heart from the fact that English football has suffered many of the same problems in recent times: ravaged by greed, imprisoned by television, jiggered inside out by relentless marketeering.
And yet the two remain wonderfully vibrant bedfellows. The paradox here is that when, as at this time of year, you put these two jaded institutions together ? football! Christmas! ? there is still an astringent, cleansing magic about the combination, a sense of all those recent corrosions falling away, like two old friends getting together over a cautious lunchtime pint and suddenly it's the good old days all over again.
Festive football is a brilliantly exciting thing. There are even those who would say it is the best thing about Christmas, that without football Christmas is simply shopping, meat and an argument. Either way football is going to be everywhere for the next week, bursting forth in a grand bouquet of consolation from every dank and stilted family tea-time, every traffic?jammed radio. There is often talk about diluting the rush of games at this time of year. But frankly this would be madness and I for one will fight to keep the festive season as it is: clogged, rammed and gloriously gluttonous.
Perhaps the best single thing about festive football is its swooning intensity. Football just seems more meaningful at this time of year, and not simply because all football seems more meaningful when you're either drunk or hung over. This is where seasons are made, saved or damned by the bundled fouling last-ditch panic-equaliser in the frightening sludge of Boxing Day. There will be freak results: a wild-eyed 3-3, a shock turning-over, some unrepeatable feat of individual brilliance.
More than this, festive football is intoxicatingly sentimental. Suddenly the players look heroic, physically prodigious, like soldiers or handsome firemen. It is an insidious power: I even find myself going all husky and brave at the sight of the Match of the Day studio Christmas tree. Steve Kean makes we want to cry at the best of times, mainly because on the touchline he resembles a damp-eyed baby panda or a slippy?slidey newborn fawn taking its first gangly steps in the April frosts. The thought of Steve Kean at Christmas ? Steve Kean shivering, Steve Kean singing carols in the snow ? is almost too much to bear.
This is no accident. There is more to football and Christmas than simply certain shared characteristics ? the choral tone, the proselytising passion, even the churchy roots of clubs originally formed out of parish halls. In Britain football really found itself as a holiday game, the vast crowds of the first golden age a product of the half-day Saturday holiday for factory workers, a fruit of Victorian urban working-class prosperity. There is still something stirringly rootsy about the demob-happy holiday crowds, descendants of the record 1,272,185 Football League crowd on 27 December 1949, or the 53,000 who watched Dick, Kerr's Ladies beat St Helens on Boxing Day 1921. It is a basic national trait, this bleary-eyed festive migration, characteristic of an itinerant, frozen people drawn to damp and fruitless pilgrimages.
This is also one reason why a winter break is such a bad idea. Christmas is a proven box-office hit and would no doubt be spared, but the break would still dilute its power. Festive football is the perfect prelude to the shared darkness of January, a month of gloom and graft where football is still there by your side with its arm around your shoulder, sharing its chips with you at the bus stop, guiding you with memories of that glorious second honeymoon just passed. So don't go shopping this festive season. Go to the football and treat yourself to a draught of invigorating winter escapism. It's definitely what Jesus would do.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2011/dec/23/christmas-football-steve-kean
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