I'm Planning a Christmas Party. And it's Important.

As I write this, two Mary Berry Classic Christmas Cakes sit in the kitchen cupboard. My niece made them, and every so often she comes by to feed them with brandy – "at intervals", per the recipe. She is also busy making a truckload of frangipane mince pies, and I'm hoping I can cajole her into creating her own version of Mary's "stained glass" (it's not really glass) gingerbread house.

People talk about important books: Human Action, Plato’s Republic, the Wealth of Nations, War and Peace… And yes, I get it, these are all important books that have contributed to building the civilization we live in. But I'm starting to think that this book belongs right there with them. This year especially.

Seven years ago, writing about Christmas, I said:

"(W)hat we are celebrating is not the fact that we have perfect lives in a flawless world and we couldn’t ask for more. What we are celebrating is the bits of light, wherever they are and however small, in a world that we know is filled with much darkness…

"Maybe, as we become adults, and as we become more intensely aware of the suffering, the loss, and the evil in the world, it does become harder to celebrate Christmas. That doesn’t make it less important to celebrate it though. It makes it more important."

I'm feeling this in a big way this year. We are no longer in the throes of the very worst of (insert your preferred term for the bullshit of the past 3.75 years). Yet we cannot say that it is "over." There are whispers of mask mandates returning, the vax pushers are still doing their thing, and many, many families are still fractured and bleeding from the great axe that fell in 2020, slicing the world into usses and thems. Perhaps most disturbing, the folks who committed human-rights violations on a massive scale are still walking free.

So it's a tough time to be an optimist. It's a tough time to believe in anything. It's especially tough to believe in the fabric that holds together our societies, or to believe in the people around us.

And that makes it all the more critical that we celebrate. All the more desperately important that we shine light into the darkness, and celebrate the light of others where we find it.

THE GRINCH WON'T LIKE IT

There's another good reason to celebrate: The folks who did this to us, and who want to do much, much more, really don't like it when we do. They prefer it when we live in fear, and if we live in fear of each other, well that's their favorite thing ever!

But, as I wrote in the early days of All This Bullshit (ATB):

"I don’t think the people who plan to test, track, monitor and force vaccinate all of humanity actually understand humanity all that well. I think they really believe that we can be controlled through fear and through force. And to be fair to them, those things have been awfully effective in the past. But I don’t think they are going to work this time.

"The tools of those who would control all of humanity are very limited. Fear, propaganda, and force can indeed be powerful. But they are not what has kept humanity going for thousands of years. We haven’t survived as a species because we are good at brutalizing each other, or at lying and cheating. We’ve survived because of our ability to cooperate, to build networks of trust, and to trade for mutual benefit. These are all things a Grinch can’t understand."

I'll admit that in the months that followed, the Grinch's campaign to control people through fear was much more effective than I had anticipated. I was – and remain – surprised by how well it worked. But I still don't believe it worked as well as the Grinch wanted it to, and I stand by what I said about the Grinch (by which I mean the WEF folks, the transhumanists, Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci, and the rest of the folks behind ATB): It does not understand humanity all that well. And its plans to rule over the rest of us, through fear, will fail. How and when they fail are largely up to us, but they will fail eventually, because they are based on an incomplete, and faulty, vision of what we are.

These folks, the ones who want us eating bugs, and not owning anything, and driving around in cars that can be shut off by someone else, they have a very particular vision for the rest of us, and it's not one that involves the exercise of our own agency. Their vision for us is one of impoverishment – not just material impoverishment, but more fundamentally, spiritual impoverishment. The folks who dream of the masses living under a Universal Basic Income understand perfectly well what that would do to people's sense of self, their initiative, their willingness to engage with the world. They understand it, and it is in perfect conformity with their vision: They do not want a world full of empowered, self-actualized individuals. They want the rest of us to be their pets.

But what the Grinch does not understand is that it is not in our nature to be pets (and yes, I know, they'd like to change that too.) Not even the several generations of government-school conditioning in that direction have turned us into the compliant labradoodles the Grinch so desperately wants. Are Americans far more mindless and compliant than they could be? Than they used to be? Absolutely. But they're still not quite ready to be anyone's pets. And attempts to push them further in that direction will only result in more dysfunction, more hostility, more prescribed medication to get them to behave like labradoodles, and more "unintended" consequences of that medication.

In the context of all of this, what is a Christmas party but an act of war?

The Grinch and his ilk have declared war on the rest of us. The question before us is, how do we respond? My answer? We celebrate. We hold Christmas parties. And dance parties, and birthday parties, and baby showers, and big family gatherings, and Oktoberfests, and little parties to celebrate all of the wonderful things that sometimes happen in our lives.

The benefits of our celebrations are manifold: They lift our spirits, and they provide a safe space for those of us who still believe in gathering in person with our fellow humans, a place where we can say the things that can't be said in the workplace, or in public. And they are very much a volley back across the lines of those who would drag us down to an existence that is less than human.

A Christmas party is a time to assert to the world that we are not afraid, most certainly not of each other. That we will not treat our fellow humans as vermin or as disease vectors. That we will not allow fear to cripple our humanity, and we will take every single opportunity we can find to reach out and connect, to support each other, and to love our neighbors. It is a declaration to the world that we will continue to live as we always have: As free humans.

If – as so many of us are – you find yourself wondering what you should be doing to fight the seemingly all-powerful darkness that threatens to engulf all of us, maybe just start with this:

Plan a Christmas party. Or some other kind of party, if Christmas isn’t your thing. If you’re doing Christmas, then I recommend the Great British Bake Off book as your guide. But I’m sure there are others. Probably someone in your family has some ideas and recipes. Plan a menu, put up decorations, make a playlist. Invite a whole bunch of people (bonus points for inviting some who have been taken in by the fear)… and then do it. Have that party. Celebrate as if your life depends upon it. Because it just might.