This Christmas in the New Normal
Our successor to This Week in the Guardian, This Week in the New Normal is our weekly chart of the progress of autocracy, authoritarianism and economic restructuring around the world.
1. How the EU saved Christmas
It’s as predictable and as it is dull, but “bird flu” is here to increase the cost of poultry this holiday season, create shortages and yada yada yada.
We all knew this would happen, but we have a new little wrinkle – The EU is here to save the day!
Several of the UK’s big supermarkets have been forced to source turkeys from elsewhere in Europe to keep shelves stocked this Christmas, after avian flu curtailed UK production.
Asda, Lidl and Morrisons are understood to be stocking branded turkey imported from mainland Europe – a move industry sources described as “unprecedented” – to “protect availability” and ensure sufficient supply for festive meals.
All three retailers’ own-label fresh and frozen turkeys will be entirely British-sourced. However, Morrisons is stocking Bernard Matthews-branded turkey from Poland, and Asda is selling a Cherrywood-branded turkey crown from mainland Europe.
I’ll bet all that Brexiting doesn’t sound like such a good idea anymore, huh?
Besides, we should have cabbage instead of turkey, anyway.
2. Chocs Away
The BBC has noticed that chocolate bars are getting smaller, less chocolatey and yet more expensive.
It’s not just chocolate, of course. Smaller, worse and more expensive is the mantra of the age (covered brilliantly here). It’s also the goal.
They want us to own nothing and be happy. They want us eating gruel with protein cubes to save the planet and they want us to smile while we’re doing it.
But the BBC isn’t going to talk about that, instead they jovially have a light hearted banter about the cost of living spiralling while companies adulterate our food, shrink their portion sizes and charge us more for the privilege.
Haha, what japes.
There’s nothing to be done about it, because it’s all climate change’s fault, and that’s totally real.
So just buy less stuff and stop whining.
3. They’re (still) coming for those wood burners
Labour might forced to slightly ban wood burning stoves, moving forward.
The updated “environment improvement plan” released earlier this month and covered exclusively in the Guardian calls for stricter targets on air pollution, and that means more limitations on stoves – including who can have them, and what they can burn.
This could involve pollution limits being tightened in smoke control areas, which already limit what fuels can be burned: for example, setting out that wood can be burned only in approved types of stoves or burners, not in fireplaces.
It could mean an effective ban on older appliances and that, in some places, it will not be possible to use a wood-burning stove at all.
In a startling coincidence, just a short while after the government said they were going to do this, an “independent report” confirmed it was a really good idea!
It turns out banning wood burning stoves is going to save us all money and stop us dying and make food taste better and just generally make things kinda awesome:
Prohibiting the use of solid fuels like wood and log burners in UK homes could prevent 1,500 deaths annually and save a whopping £54m in NHS funds, according to a recent report.
Environmental consultancy firm Ricardo has urged for stricter regulations on the use of solid fuel burners in homes, including wood burners and log fireplaces, which it links to heart conditions, lung disease, strokes, cancer, and more.
Weird, right?
But amid all this panic, nobody is asking the obvious question: Can Santa even fit down a heat pump?
4. “Generation Scrooge”
Writing for LBC, Thomas Ruys Smith argues young people aren’t giving enough money to charity:
Young people must give more to charity – or risk becoming Generation Scrooge
Apparently it’s not enough that the general cost of existing is increasing month-on-month, while taxation likewise increases, we must also accept that these taxes don’t actually solve society’s problems, and should give money to charity as well.
Charities, you understand, NOT homeless people or the poor directly. They can’t be trusted, instead just give your money to billionaire-founded corporate tax-dodges who will never tell you how they will spend it.
Taxation under threat of prison, charitable donation as a social duty. Your money isn’t really yours.
BONUS: Propaganda of the season
Mean Russian wolves are killing cuddly NATO rindeer, did you know?
I’m not exaggerating:
‘Santa’s reindeer’ are under threat. Are Russia’s wolves to blame?
Apparently wolf attacks on reindeer in Finland are increasing, and the war in Ukraine is to blame. There’s no evidence the wolves are Russian, of course. And even if they are, it’s just wolves being wolves.
Still, let’s have a xenophobic national panic and shoot some endangered animals. Merry Christmas!
BONUS II: Good news of the season!
Researchers have found that flavonoids in chocolate can protect you from the harmful effects of sitting at a desk for too long:
A team of researchers found that there might be a way to reverse the effects of sitting, and it comes in the form of another indulgence that could kill you: cocoa.
Specifically, researchers from the University of Birmingham England say that the flavanols in cocoa can counteract the effects of too much sitting. This is the same compound that gives dark chocolate and red wine their reputation for being somewhat healthy, despite the sugar and alcohol being unhealthy.
Yes, it’s just vice. And yes, modern science is usually rubbish. And Yes, flavinoids can be found in things other than cocoa – fruits, nuts, etc. – but ignore all of that.
Chocolate will save your life, that’s the headline.
So try not to sit still for too long, but if you have to, well then make sure you have a cup of cocoa too.
Christmas Recommendations
We’re four or five deep with This Christmases now, and I’m running out of recommendations to make. Christmases keep on coming, but the production of decent Christmas-related media is decidedly slower. And I suppose it’s the nature of seasonal viewing that we repeat traditions and find comfort in the familiar.
So, I’m going to listen to Carols from Kings and watch Arthur Christmas like I do every year, and invite all of you do whatever evokes the season of giving and allows you to relax and enjoy the moment.
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All told a pretty hectic Christmas season for the new normal crowd, and we didn’t even mention pigs-in-blankets causing cancer, how to talk to racist relatives at the dinner table or how “the far right stole Christmas”.
There’s a lot of change in the air, a lot of agendas in the works, but there are times to let all of that go and just try and relax and live your life. Remember to take that time, and from all of us here at OffG, please try and have yourself a merry little Christmas.
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Happy 25th December to everyone celebrating on this day!! Have a fantastic time and lots of love from Offg Admin 🎄❤️🎄
After the horrendous encouragement of rape (“Baby It’s Cold Outside”) we have the appalling Eurocentrism of “Do They Know It’s Christmas”:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/a7aek4/can_we_talk_about_how_ignorant_and_racist_do_they/
The transgressions of this song are truly horrific. Ethiopia is confused with Africa – even though the former is within the latter and so the song is geographically correct at least for the purposes of raising money for an African country.
“And there won’t be snow in Africa this Christmas” because “(i)t’s on the equator. Shocking ignorance of regional climates!
Oh, and mentioning Christmas is an offence to those Africans who would more likely be Muslims. Even though once again, it was a Western single to prompt fund raising amongst Westerners.
“And finally, the song depicts the entirety of Ethio sorry, Africa as a complete shit hole”. By the same token, nobody should mention poverty in the UK or US because these countries have lottsa rich folk! Fuck the poor!
But even all that fades in atrocity quotient compared to the most vile of all those Christmas songs. Jingle Bells:
https://www.abhmuseum.org/the-dark-history-of-jingle-bells-from-blackface-minstrelsy-to-christmas-classic/
Why Jingle Bells? Because it seems that the original singers were white folk who blacked up. Oh so that’s why, every time I hear Jingle Bells, I feel like applying ink to my face and singing Zip-a-dee-doo-dah?
The pep-talk about how to talk to racist/ vax denying/ conspiracy theorist/ transphobic etc. relatives over Christmas is fast becoming one of the new festive traditions. I find it positively arousing to be condescended to about how to maintain my Groovy Left Fuckery in the face of Fascist Right Wing Reactionaries over the turkey.
And it fair swells my heart to find that our tireless philanthropic overlords have founded a whole new charity to instruct over the proper handling of this thorny issue.
https://whoisyourneighbour.org.uk/
Remember:
And you no longer have to worry about those dark days when your friends and relatives may indulge in reckless irresponsible opinion spouting. Our concerned moral guardians are here to provide expert conversation management:
You don’t even have to think up any words of your own. Our guide gives you the lines and all you have to do is learn them!
It’s important to “weigh up” individual family members to assess their usefulness in making the “proper” contributions.
It is important to realise that you – yes you – can make a difference in pushing back this wave of inexplicable hatred and steer our wondrous community back to that land of bouncing loveliness we all shared in once.
Minaj is showing us where her loyalties belong – for those unaware the black and white checked floor is a symbol of the Masonic Order.
Truth Seeker (@_TruthZone_): “Nicki Minaj is part of the club.” | nitter.poast.org
Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal): “Nicki Minaj, who was obviously recruited by rich Trump cronies, pushes interventionist propaganda as US military surveillance flights begin over Nigeria It seems clear Trump Inc is stirring this phony narrative to get at Nigeria’s vast oil reserves” | nitter.poast.org
They all pay homage to their masters – and openly show us who they really are.
Truth Seeker (@_TruthZone_): “What do you notice about this photo? They always show you their affiliation…” | nitter.poast.org
Finally, even the highest authorities are pointing out that there are serious social problems that the ruling patriarchy still refuses to acknowledge! https://www.krone.at/3994615
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orgasm_gap
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Annual_Global_Orgasm_for_Peace
Faith, Movement, and the Modern Pulpit: The Pastor Who Took Her Sermon to the Pole
On a quiet street in Stiekelkamperfehn, a small village in northern Germany, the local Lutheran congregation gathers around an unusual ministry. Their pastor, a woman in her forties with a background in fitness and theology, has gained national attention for combining her two callings: she preaches about faith, self‑worth, and acceptance — while performing on a pole.
Clips from regional television and videos shared online show her addressing her audience in a calm, pastoral tone before demonstrating what she describes as a “fusion of spirituality and embodiment.” To her, the pole is not a symbol of transgression but of liberation — a way to reclaim the body as sacred rather than sinful, creative rather than constrained.
The reaction has been anything but uniform. Supporters say she brings authenticity to a church struggling to connect with the modern world. They see her blending discipline, movement, and theology as an affirmation that the body, too, is part of divine creation. Critics, however, view it as another sign of the church’s drift — a symptom of a culture so intent on self‑expression that reverence becomes indistinguishable from performance.
The debate around her ministry reaches beyond Stiekelkamperfehn. It has touched on longstanding questions about gender, authority, and the place of tradition in institutions that once defined moral order for entire societies. In a century when faith often competes with entertainment for attention, her story resonates as both a curiosity and a mirror.
Whether interpreted as inspired innovation or a step too far, her example illustrates a tension at the heart of modern religion: the effort to make sacred space speak a contemporary language without losing what once made it sacred.
Activate available English audio track https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Dpmw4wpHAk
Activate YT auto-subs for translation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkCMBA3fn7Q
Cold turkey for the local plebs, caviar for the captains of the EU Titanic.
Keep grouping and sleeping like well fed sheep till the grass is ‘suddenly’ is gone. Watch out for the Russia wolf! shout the WEF shepherds.
It may not be the absolute perfect Christmas gift, but your family, friends and contacts will greatly appreciate your sincere expression of genuine concern for their health by sharing the recent bombshell discussion on the criminal, wicked technocratic transhumanist agenda between the honorable Dr. Gary Null and the good, honorable Dr. Ana Maria Mihalcea.
Happy Holidays/Season’s Greetings to all…
See: https://onenessofhumanity.wordpress.com/2025/12/24/dr-gary-null-and-dr-ana-maria-mihalcea-blow-up-the-wicked-technocratic-transhumanist-agenda/
This all that matters this Christmas with an ongoing genocide.
Christmas is not a Western story – it is a Palestinian one
“Christmas is a story of empire, injustice and the vulnerability of ordinary people caught in its path.
Every December, much of the Christian world enters a familiar cycle of celebration: carols, lights, decorated trees, consumer frenzy and the warm imagery of a snowy night. In the United States and Europe, public discourse often speaks of “Western Christian values”, or even the vague notion of “Judeo-Christian civilisation”. These phrases have become so common that many assume, almost automatically, that Christianity is inherently a Western religion — an expression of European culture, history and identity.
Christianity is, and has always been, a West Asian / Middle Eastern religion. Its geography, culture, worldview and founding stories are rooted in this land — among peoples, languages and social structures that look far more like those in today’s Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Jordan than anything imagined in Europe. Even Judaism, invoked in the term “Judeo-Christian values”, is itself a thoroughly Middle Eastern phenomenon. The West received Christianity — it certainly did not give birth to it.
And perhaps nothing reveals the distance between Christianity’s origins and its contemporary Western expression more starkly than Christmas — the birth story of a Palestinian Jew, a child of this land who was born long before modern borders and identities emerged.
In the West, Christmas is a cultural marketplace. It is commercialised, romanticised and wrapped in layers of sentimentality. Lavish gift-giving overshadows any concern for the poor. The season has become a performance of abundance, nostalgia, and consumerism — a holiday stripped of its theological and moral core.
Even the familiar lines of the Christmas song Silent Night obscure the true nature of the story: Jesus was not born into serenity but into upheaval.
He was born under military occupation, to a family displaced by an imperial decree, in a region living under the shadow of violence. The holy family were forced to flee as refugees because the infants of Bethlehem, according to the Gospel narrative, were massacred by a fearful tyrant determined to preserve his reign. Sound familiar?
Indeed, Christmas is a story of empire, injustice and the vulnerability of ordinary people caught in its path.
For many in the West, Bethlehem – the birthplace of Jesus – is a place of imagination — a postcard from antiquity, frozen in time. The “little town” is remembered as a quaint village from scripture rather than a living, breathing city with actual people, with a distinct history and culture.
Bethlehem today is surrounded by walls and checkpoints built by an occupier. Its residents live under a system of apartheid and fragmentation. Many feel cut off, not only from Jerusalem – which the occupier does not allow them to visit – but also from the global Christian imagination that venerates Bethlehem’s past while often ignoring its present.
This sentiment also explains why so many in the West, while celebrating Christmas, care little about the Christians of Bethlehem. Even worse, many embrace theologies and political attitudes that erase or dismiss our presence entirely in order to support Israel, the empire of today.
In these frameworks, ancient Bethlehem is cherished as a sacred idea, but modern Bethlehem — with its Palestinian Christians suffering and struggling to survive — is an inconvenient reality that needs to be ignored.
This disconnect matters. When Western Christians forget that Bethlehem is real, they disconnect from their spiritual roots. And when they forget that Bethlehem is real, they also forget that the story of Christmas is real.
They forget that it unfolded among a people who lived under empire, who faced displacement, who longed for justice, and who believed that God was not distant but among them.
So what does Christmas look like when told from the perspective of the people who still live where it all began — the Palestinian Christians? What meaning does it hold for a tiny community that has preserved its faith for two millennia?
At its heart, Christmas is the story of the solidarity of God.
It is the story of God who does not rule from afar, but is present among the people and takes the side of those on the margins. The incarnation — the belief that God took on flesh — is not a metaphysical abstraction. It is a radical statement about where God chooses to dwell: in vulnerability, in poverty, among the occupied, among those with no power except the power of hope.
In the Bethlehem story, God identifies not with emperors but with those suffering under empire — its victims. God comes not as a warrior but as an infant. God is present not in a palace but in a manger. This is divine solidarity in its most striking form: God joins the most vulnerable part of humanity.
Christmas, then, is the proclamation of a God who confronts the logic of empire.
For Palestinians today, this is not merely theology — it is lived experience. When we read the Christmas story, we recognise our own world: the census that forced Mary and Joseph to travel resembles the permits, checkpoints and bureaucratic controls that shape our daily lives today. The holy family’s flight resonates with the millions of refugees who have fled wars across our region. Herod’s violence echoes in the violence we see around us.
Christmas is a Palestinian story par excellence.
Bethlehem celebrates Christmas for the first time after two years without public festivities. It was painful yet necessary for us to cancel our celebrations; we had no choice.
A genocide was unfolding in Gaza, and as people who still live in the homeland of Christmas, we could not pretend otherwise. We could not celebrate the birth of Jesus while children his age were being pulled dead from the rubble.
Celebrating this season does not mean the war, the genocide, or the structures of apartheid have ended. People are still being killed. We are still besieged.
Instead, our celebration is an act of resilience — a declaration that we are still here, that Bethlehem remains the capital of Christmas, and that the story this town tells must continue.
At a time when Western political discourse increasingly weaponises Christianity as a marker of cultural identity — often excluding the very people among whom Christianity was born — it is vital to return to the roots of this story.
This Christmas, our invitation to the global church — and to Western Christians in particular — is to remember where the story began. To remember that Bethlehem is not a myth but a place where people still live. If the Christian world is to honour the meaning of Christmas, it must turn its gaze to Bethlehem — not the imagined one, but the real one, a town whose people today still cry out for justice, dignity and peace.
To remember Bethlehem is to remember that God stands with the oppressed — and that the followers of Jesus are called to do the same.”
The fabled Santa says to the naughty 5 year old kids as they drive by, you mean I didn’t even scare ya?