Welcome to Christmas Week at SteynOnline. To Christianity, this is the season of Advent. To Judaism, this is the climax of Hanukkah. To Islam, this is a target-rich environment. It is nine years since I wrote:
Over the summer, I met a lady from southern Germany who had found herself on the receiving end of some vibrant multicultural outreach from one of Mutti Merkel's boy charmers. As a result, she no longer goes out after dark. She had also decided - with reluctance, because she enjoyed it - to cancel her participation in a local Christmas market, where she'd sung carols every year - in broad daylight.
"Why would you do that?" I asked.
"Because it's Christmas," she said, "and I'm worried Christmas will be a target."
At the time we had downed a fair few drinks at a summer resort at the opposite end of the country, up on what Germans call the Ostsee. It seemed a faintly paranoid thing to say, and I put it down to the sexual assault Frau Merkel had forced her to undergo. But that December Christmas was indeed a target - and in Berlin twelve people died and fifty-six were injured at the kind of market my friend had sung at every year up to 2015.
And, in nothing flat, tens of millions of people across western Europe meekly accepted that a Christmas market can only be held behind submachine guns and walls of diversity bollards:
Christmas markets without armed police are now a thing of the past
...and, if your town can't afford all the security, Christmas markets at all are a thing of the past. Reader Robert Strauss wrote to me:
Mark,
There's something so disheartening and depressing about the closing of the Lyon Christmas market due to the cost of security concerns that it makes a person just plain tired. Christmas markets are such wonderful traditions: fun and kitsch (in the most wonderful way) and beautiful and singularly atmospheric. I love walking through them. It's where a kid's face lights up and a grandparent can escape back into kid-like memories.
And now it's going away. I can't help but think of the hashtag-'not-going-to-let-it-affect-our-daily-lives' mantra coming from the likes of Obama, Sadiq Khan, Theresa, and soda-tax enthusiast Jim Kenney. Hey, the gift-packaged barriers really look nice and Christmasy, don't they? Nothing abnormal there, people. Just pretend there still is a Christmas market when you look at the cute, packaged barriers and enjoy the carols in your earbuds.
What a sad, heartbreaking crock.
Bob S.
Which was promptly followed by the latest vehicular jihad in a thoroughly bollardised Melbourne. That last one I wrote about, but you can't write about them all - because you'd go mad writing the same column over and over while the western world's political class sticks its fingers in its ears and says, "Nya-nya, can't hear you!" No amount of death and destruction will persuade them to change the mad course they have set. And so once open and shared traditions become throttled by bollards and security. And in meekly agreeing to surrender our future we lose our past, too.
I used to love visiting cities "dressed in holiday style", to quote Livingston & Evans. Not anymore: everything is increasingly aesthetically disfigured. So a few years back, after a glum week of New York guest-hosting during a holiday-heightened terror alert, I woke up early one morning and wrote up my feelings on this madness as a short story, which we offer over the next two nights as a bonus Tale for Our Time, which Mark Steyn Club members can hear by clicking here and logging-in.
It's not in the same league, obviously, as our classic Christmas offerings from Charles Dickens and Dylan Thomas, but, alas, from Berlin to Bondi and the insane deluded responses thereto, it seems more timely each year.
~The addition of Trollope to our roster of Christmas contributors has gone down well with listeners. Paul Bohme, a First Month Founding Member of The Mark Steyn Club from northwestern France, writes:
This rendition of Not if I know it was brilliantly read and had me experiencing the emotions of the three characters involved.
I suppose I should have seen the end coming, but I didn't and I literally laughed out loud.
I was listening with headphones on and the other occupants the looked at me in bewilderment.
Paul's fellow if anglo Paul, a Colorado Steyn Clubber, had a more pressing question. He wanted to know the title of "the heartbreakingly beautiful theme music" to our Christmas excursion to Green Gables. That would be "See Amid the Winter Snow", a somewhat under-appreciated carol by Sir John Goss, who also wrote "Praise, my soul, the King of Heaven". Maybe we'll do it for our Christmas Eve Lessons and Carols one year.
~If you're not yet a member of The Mark Steyn Club, we've a veritable library of audio adventures waiting for you - by Conan Doyle, H G Wells, Conrad, Kipling, Scott Fitzgerald. You can find more information about the Club here - and, if you've a pal who'd appreciate these Tales for Our Time, check out our Gift Membership. It's a perfect Christmas present, and can be digitally delivered.
If you enjoy Episode One, please join us for the conclusion of Plum Duff tomorrow evening, Monday, and for more Christmas fare as the week proceeds.