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November 18, 2006
Politically Correct Meat Products
Daily Express journos are frothing at the mouth with the discovery that a school was planning to have a Christmas dinner with halal chicken instead of turkey. Which seemed odd to me; lots of people have chicken instead of turkey for Christmas dinner (or, indeed, at our office, lots of people go and have curry or meze for Christmas dinner, on account of how disgracefully expensive Central London turkey dinners tend to be). What's the big fuss. And Jonathan's school (whisper this bit) both serves a Christmas dinner and serves only halal meat. So they may have been doing this for years without it exciting comment. Anyway, the school has now backed down.
Meanwhile, a search on 'halal Christmas dinner' reveals that it is possible to get a traditionally slaughtered halal turkey, and a good thing too given the apparent rise in demand for a traditional British halal Christmas dinner with all the trimmings. Mixed marriages are blamed there.
It is, of course, no stranger for Muslims to celebrate Christmas with a tree, presents and turkey than for our family, where we don't revere Christ even a little bit. However, we celebrated this bizarre modern advent season yesterday by going to see The Nightmare Before Christmas in 3d, on its first day of general release here. It was in the new Disney Real 3d, which delivers a polarised image using a single digital projector showing 144fps. I'd not seen the film before, so I was watching the film as well as the 3d. It is terrific; perhaps the best 3d movie ever, and all the better because of a notable lack of eyepopping 3d effects. It was just charming and real. Oh, yes, and great 3d skeletal reindeer. It is also very careful with its descriptions of how Christmas works as a holiday. The film never actually says that half the planet worships Santa Claus, but it doesn't exactly deny it either; Santa is clearly the most important person in Christmastown.
Meanwhile, I learn from BoingBoing that over in Wales, Trading Standards have come down hard on Welsh Dragon Sausages, demanding that they be relabelled to avoid confusion for customers who buy them expecting them to contain actual Welsh dragon meat, rather than pork, leek and chili.
Posted by Alison Scott at November 18, 2006 08:03 PM
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