"Merry Crisis and a Happy New Fear"

It just warms the heart...

Athens riot police play "defend the tree"

Decorating the Athens Christmas Tree, with heaps of rubbish, on Saturday 20 Dec. 2008

and

…also, a report from the BBC showing how the tree looked once protesters assaulted it with bags of refuse…

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=iHyxFTrpLQQ

…and for more American tastes, this “special season” sees the revival of a band that makes it feel like 25 years have not gone by…singing “Oh come all ye faithful” (Oh come let us adore him? Which him they mean may not be as clear as one might think.) (thanks Anthony)

…and possibly the only appropriate poem, if not the best of all poems…

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?