BOBSON GBINIJE's article you should have read last Christmas.

Shebi na jeje I Siddon dey whack bread and akara the other night when my eyes narrowed down on the string of words on the half-torn newspaper that now served as my dinner plate. The room was dimly lit, courtesy PHCN, or what is it they are called now?

Well, I had a dying rechargeable lamp looking down on the meal; it did well to light up just the portion of the table where I had my now half-consumed bread and akara. I could now see the lettering of the write-up clearly.

"I can always read along while I down my meal," I thought. The article was about Christmas and the author added one vocabulary like that. I consoled myself that I will get the meaning by the time I am through with the article, but by the time I was done with the first, second paragraph, I had already looked for the name of the author. I thought it was the man from Edo's Oredo Constituency, Patrick Obaiagbon.

As I continued reading, the article was "sweeting" me, though I didn't understand much. See vocab! Jejune! What is jejuning? Did he imply ojuju? Perfidious! Machiavellian! Chei! This guy don quickly borrow 2 Pac name use o. Yawa dey! Anyway, the akara oyell didn't allow me see everything clearly sha, so I decided I must Google it, read and share. I found it on vanguard's website and it was there I discovered the article was actually published on the 29th of November, 2013. If you have not seen it, it is still news...

Download Kindle E-books

Christmas and wanton revelry on november 29, 2013 at 12:55 am in viewpoint

The reason for the Christmas season is the commemoration of the glorious birth of our Lord and Saviour Jesus the Christ. Although, the exact date of His birth remains an issue of great scholastic saber-rattling, one infallible truth that stands with unshakeable firmness is that Christ is the immaculate quintessence of love.

The commemoration of his birth is supposed to be a season of spiritual and physical retreat for stock-taking about how well we have lived a Christ-like life.

The synoptic and hedonistic zeitgeist that has now become the idiosyncratic concomitant of Christmas celebrants redounds to the truism that the spiritual epiphany of Christmas is now sunken in the quagmire of Dionysian exuberance. Hence, the Greek philosopher Socrates said in his PLUTARACH that “bad men live that they may eat and drink, whereas good men eat and drink that they may live”. The bacchanalian debauchery during Christmas season is morally nauseating.

The penumbra of darkness enshrining the subject of Christmas Day is further silhouetted by the avalanche and pyrotechnic of lies unleashed by religious harlequins. One school of thought said in the Encyclopedia American that “the reason for establishing December 25 as Christmas day is somewhat obscure, but it is usually held that the day was chosen to correspond to the pagan festivals that took place to celebrate the birth of the sun.

The Roman saturnalia is a festival dedicated to Saturn, the god of agriculture and to the renewed power of the sun. Some Christmas customs are thought to be rooted in this ancient pagan celebration.

All this not withstanding, the concern of this write-up is the ghoulish way and manner in which Nigerians, nay the people of the world, celebrate Christmas with prodigal intemperance and saturnalian revelry. There is no concern for the spirit of truth, peace, honesty and love, attributes that constitute the hallmark of Christ’s life.

How can one explain a situation where through random sampling our President, 52%of our legislators, 49% of our Governors, 50%of our Ministers, 50%of our local government chairmen, 60% of our councilors, 25% of our commissioners and 52%of Nigerians are Christians.

Yet we still luxuriate in corruption of monumental proportion. Christians are cocooned in filthy lucre, homosexuality and sodomy, grotesque terpsichorean fits in places of worship, assassinations, kidnappings, bribery and corruption, cultism, depraved economic and political prebendalistic graft. Which Christ are we celebrating? Which God are we celebrating?

Which Holy Spirit are we celebrating? How can we truly be celebrating Christmas when we walk past dead bodies, lepers, the poor and needy without batting an eyelid and sparing a thought for them. Adam Smith posits that “no society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part, of the members are poor and miserable.

Christ admonished us to strive for the lofty and high ideals of a noble conscience and humanism, and that life is not all about money! money!! money!!! But about lifting up mankind, about sacrificing our lives to lift up mankind, about being Christ-like in conduct, about sparing a thought for the poor and about giving generously to mankind. Our churches, ecclesiastical hierarchy and Christmas alike, have made a very little impact on the moral growth of society because, they build their church close to St. Peter and yet worship at the gates of hell. A symphony of lunacy.

Christmas is not a season for jejune insipidity in spiritual matters. It is not a period for perfidious and Machiavellian dis-ingenuousness.

It is a period for our leaders and the citizenry at large to heighten the vibrancy of our cerebral virtuosity and eviscerate pragmatic solutions to the problems of mankind by being sober and musing on how, why and what Christ lived for.

We must desist from walking, dancing, strutting and drinking from the frills and thrills of libertines. Jesus Christ is love and all our utterances and actions should be propelled by love.

We must realise and be ever conscious; of the fact that life is ephemeral. It is volatile and evanescent. We must walk steadfastly with humility and fear of God, for no condition is permanent and nobody knows tomorrow.

Hence, essayist and poet, Matthew Arnold said: “….For we are all like swimmers in the sea, poised on the top of wave of fate, which hangs uncertain to which side to fall. And whether it will roll us out to sea to the deep wave of death, we known not and no search will make us know: only the event will teach us in its hour”. Therefore we must live for Christ and in Christ Jesus by serving mankind in truth and love.

Finally, we must see the world as one big philharmonic and symphony orchestrain which we are all players and so long as we pick our tunes and keys right, the musical configurations and rhythms will be melodious. But once one or two players degenerate to a discordant tone, the whole graceful symmetry and grandiose sublimity of the rhythm will precipitate a symphony of lunacy with no granule and scintilla of integrity in it. Let us celebrate Christmas by sparing a thought for the poor as Christ did and not saturnalian debauchery. HAPPY CHRISTMAS

BOBSON GBINIJE, founder of the Mandate Against Poverty, Warri.

I know, I know. don't you worry. I will break the content down to you: Baba simply said "You must buy a chicken, if not a goat, for me next Christmas.

Kindle Reader for Android