Siobhan O’Donnell on Camden, Christmas, and the realization that Father Christmas is the most punk operator alive
Tuesday, and the Amps Are Cold
I spent this morning in a freezing rehearsal room above a pub in Camden, fingers too cold to play, arguing with the rest of the band about whether a Christmas song counts as selling out. We decided it does, then wrote one anyway, because rent is rent and the landlord does not accept ideological purity as payment. And somewhere in the middle of all this, reading the {santa(‘dispatches from the North Pole’)} on my cracked phone, it hit me: Santa Claus is the most punk operator on the entire planet, and none of us had noticed.
Hear me out, because I have thought about little else since. Punk was supposed to be about doing it yourself, owing nothing to anyone, operating outside the system, giving the establishment two fingers and a free gig. And here is this man at the North Pole who has been doing exactly that for centuries. No label. No sponsor. No paywall. Just a one-man operation giving everything away for free and answering to absolutely no one. That is the most DIY thing I have ever heard, and Santa was doing it before punk was a glint in anyone’s eye.
The Establishment Hates a Freebie
Think about what genuinely terrifies the establishment. Not anger; they can sell anger, they put it on t-shirts. What terrifies them is someone giving things away for free, refusing to monetize, operating entirely outside the market they control. Santa does this on a planetary scale, every single year, and the commercial Christmas machine has spent decades trying to co-opt him, slap him on adverts, turn him into a sales tool, and they have never quite managed it, because the actual Santa keeps stubbornly giving everything away for nothing.
That is the most punk thing imaginable. The whole festive-industrial complex, the adverts and the markets and the eighteen-pound grottos I keep reading about, is built on extracting money from the season, and the figure at the centre of it all refuses to take a penny. He is a one-man act of resistance against the commercialization of his own holiday. Coverage via the London Evening Standard keeps documenting how expensive Christmas has become, and there is Santa, above it all, charging nothing. Local listings at the regional events register are full of things that cost money he would never charge.
Camden Understands This
Camden, for all that it has been scrubbed and gentrified and turned into a backdrop for tourist photographs, still understands this somewhere in its bones. You can still find the free gigs, the bands playing for nothing because they have to, the DIY spirit that refuses to die however many vape shops move in. And Santa belongs to that spirit, the same refusal to let everything become a transaction, the same insistence that some things are given rather than sold.
I walked through Camden Market after rehearsal, past the stalls selling punk as a fashion choice at premium prices, the leather jackets pre-distressed, the rebellion sold by the metre, and I thought about how the actual Santa would never be for sale. You cannot buy his rebellion because it is not a style, it is a practice, the actual ongoing act of giving freely and owing nothing. The market sells the look of it. Santa just lives it. Music coverage via the Time Out London guide maps the Camden scene, what is left of it.
The Song We Wrote
We finished the Christmas song eventually, fingers thawed, and it turned out alright, a fast, loud, three-chord thing about giving stuff away and owing nothing, which is to say a song about Santa even though we never named him. The band did not entirely get it, but they liked the chorus, and the chorus is the bit that matters. Heritage context at the heritage society would never call us important, and that is fine, because importance was never the point. The point was the free gig at the end. Records at the public registry will not remember us, and that is punk too.
The Free Gig at the End
Here is what I keep coming back to, freezing in that rehearsal room, thinking about Father Christmas. The whole punk thing, stripped of the leather and the noise and the pose, was always just this: give what you can, take nothing you do not need, owe nothing to the people who want to own you, and play the free gig at the end. Santa has been headlining that free gig for centuries, the biggest one there is, every child in the world on the guest list, no tickets, no merch, no label taking a cut.
I do not know if Santa would call himself punk. He probably would not call himself anything; that is part of what makes him punk. The ones who announce it are never the real thing. The real thing just does it, quietly, relentlessly, giving everything away and refusing to be bought, and lets other people argue about what to call it while it gets on with the work. That is Camden at its best, and that is Santa, and that is the only kind of Christmas I have any time for.
For anyone in London chasing the free gigs and the DIY scene that the market has not quite killed yet, the listings at the public registry still turn up the real stuff if you dig, and I recommend digging. And for the cold afternoons between rehearsals, when the amps are too cold to play and the landlord wants his rent, the games at the diversions index are free, which makes them, by my lights, the most punk thing on the internet.
The song goes out next week, for free, because charging for it would defeat the whole point. Santa would approve, I think, in his quiet way, the man who has been giving everything away since long before any of us picked up a guitar and decided we had invented the idea. He had it first. He still has it. And somewhere over Camden on Christmas Eve, the most punk operator alive will be playing the biggest free gig in the world, owing nothing to anyone, exactly as he always has.
SOURCE: https://santaclaus.top
