Plenty of people were posting pictures of at least some aspects of their Christmas dinner yesterday. Mine, if you’re interested, was extremely nice: eaten in the evening in the lovely hotel we are staying at courtesy of a generous family member.
Of course, not everyone celebrates Christmas (or any other midwinter festival), and what social media I’ve been looking it has had as many sad, angry, resentful and despairing messages as cheerful ones.
Something that is, just maybe, a reason to be cheerful whatever your yesterday was like, though, might be that this year’s Christmas Number One is something that deserves its place at the top of the charts.
Charity records are often… not all that. Musically grim, lyrically questionable, dubious in terms of how much good they actually do, usually put out by a mix of well-intentioned idiots and past-it pop nearly-stars hoping for a bit more fame. We Built This City On Sausage
Rolls avoids all those traps. It’s put out by a vlogger who might well have his own following, but who is not a rock or pop star. It’s a reworking of a hugely unfashionable track from a hugely. unfashionable genre, but it makes no attempts to induce mawkish blubbering. The video is, of course, sleek and rehearsed rather than the cheerful shambles it pretends to be, but that’s entirely forgivable. The parody lyrics are silly but free from condescension or portentious guff.
And the proceeds go to the Trussell Trust, one of those charities who do a simple and infuriatingly necessary job very well. It could be argued that the need for food banks is 100% the opposite of positive, but something about the prevalence of this rather cute, silly song over the past week or so suggests that more and more people are more and more convinced that poverty is not the fault of the poor, and that we need to help one another as much as we can.
Maybe that’s the hope we need. Maybe a little silliness and a little kindness.