WHAT is meant to be the time of goodwill and cheer can be for many nothing more than a gluttonous chaos of mixed emotions, credit-card debt and misery. Christmas can be the crappiest time of the year. 

Like Ebenezer Scrooge, George Osborne delivered his Autumn Statement just in time for Christmas, pledging a further £30 billion of cuts, with welfare being the prime target for savings and 24 million people receiving the biggest propaganda-filled Christmas card of all time. 

The intention behind the annual tax statement is to incite anger among taxpayers towards welfare recipients, which include pensioners, war veterans and disabled people. 

Happy Christmas to you too, Mr Scrooge Osborne. 

This is a plan to heap further misery on the poor at a time where there are over a million foodbank users in the UK. 

It has left Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby “more shocked by the plight of the UK’s poor than by those suffering in African refugee camps.” 

In a race to the bottom, the DWP press office says everything is OK because in Germany there are 1.5 million foodbank users a month.

The latest figures from the Office of National Statistics reveal the number of families in emergency government-funded accommodation is at a five-year high as benefit cap and bedroom tax monsters bite. 

In true Dickensian style, there has been a 400 per cent increase of prosecutions in some areas under the 1824 Vagrancy Act for begging, sleeping rough and stealing food from supermarket bins. 

By criminalising the poor the government is punishing people for crimes of misfortune that it created — benefit sanctions, zero-hours contracts, a spiralling cost of living, extortionate rents — while doing very little to pay a living wage, combat the acute housing shortage or tackle exploitative employers, energy firms and unscrupulous landlords. 

Instead of looking at positive interventions, it is profiteering from poverty by issuing multimillion-pound contracts for super-prisons out of our tax money. 

It is trying to push through TTIP to make it easier to build even more, while driving down employment rights and propelling millions to a knife-edge existence. 

TUC And Pay4Later surveys have revealed that one in three of us will use a credit card to pay for Christmas, with the average debt per adult standing at £730. 

Many people are now using credit cards to pay for living essentials and 3.3m adults are still paying off last Christmas’s debt. 

So what is ramping up societal pressure to spend what we can ill afford at a time when many of us are having to choose between eating and heating and when 90,000 children will be homeless this Christmas? 

Who is benefiting from this mass panic? Plutocratic capitalists and the political systems that support them are. 

The pressure of living in an ever-whirring capitalist wheel says: “Spend, spend, spend.” 

Christ seems to have bugger all to do with things these days as our burgeoning consumer classes speed at faster and faster velocity towards financial implosion. It is unsustainable. 

Attempting to abate this monster will only ever end in tears, fuelling the fire of misery further by creating a false reality.

Christmas has become an existential crisis of consumerism to substantiate our existence. 

Blame Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays and his political propaganda background for the rise of consumerism and shift from “need” to “want.” 

He invented the marketing dream, creating holes in our wallets to line his own and those of his plutocrat allies. 

Do we really want get further into debt to pay for an iPad made by an underage employee in China experiencing 22 labour violations before committing suicide? 

We panic-buy crap for people because for whatever reason they have a status in our lives which makes us feel obliged towards them, but only at Christmas. 

The rest of the year they can just go and hang themselves. 

We grab the first thing on the sale shelf in Sainsbury’s and expect them to be grateful for it. 

The thing is, if someone is thrust a gift like this it is nearly always pretty obvious — maybe it’s the careless wrapping or etched expression of indifference that gives someone away. 

We are fooling no one, only ourselves by thinking no-one will notice. 

It’s one of those things that just can’t be hidden, so why bother? 

Would it not be more honest, less costly and perhaps less insulting to someone’s intelligence if we simply did what was in our hearts? 

If we all just said “stop” to this madness then collectively we could make a difference. 

Wouldn’t it be better to end this on our terms? Wouldn’t it be better to use our voting power to end neoliberalism, to elect a system where basic survival such as food, shelter and health wasn’t dependent on the goodwill of the generous but was a basic provision by the state? 

Isn’t this what we pay our taxes for? Isn’t that what we should be putting in our letter to Santa? 

Isn’t trying to rationalise the brainwashed consumer-driven demands of a child better than trying to rationalise a credit card extension with your bank manager? 

Credit is finite. At some point the computer will say No. Then what? 

We need to think carefully before propelling ourselves into the lion’s pit. 

There are no gold stars from Santa for being a martyr. Why get maxed out on a credit card for a new dress to impress colleagues who have already seen us at our very worst with Monday morning hangovers? It will impress no-one. 

Why blow a monthly food budget and eat baked beans for all of January to pay for not-quite-organised parties, while not-quite-sure if anyone is going to turn up for them? 

Why feel compelled to do this with a ferocity that would suggest the world was about to end?

Life is stressful enough, and in the precious days that we have off between Christmas and new year, why don’t we try to make sure they are cherished and spent wisely? 

Let’s step off the hamster wheel, recharge our batteries and use this time to relax and be still, cherish the simple things — go for a walk, drop in on friends and spend quality time with people we like and love. 

Sod spending and the sales. It will be liberating. Time is the most precious gift we can give anyone and it doesn’t cost a penny. This is the true spirit of Christmas.

n Mary Griffiths Clarke is prospective parliamentary candidate for Dwyfor Meirionnydd and co-chair of Disability Labour.