Christmas Gifts

Mary Malone writes:
Christmas is a big excuse for keeping in touch with family and old friends, but it is much more than that. Christmas is the season when we give gifts to each other.
 In a Patriarchal society  giving to each other is not normal. Indeed, giving freely is rather frowned upon, as giving does not help the economy, the Economy of Control, grow. Those who give freely are disparaged as being a bit simple or a bit stupid, or perhaps devious, deviant, and self-seeking. People are encouraged to buy and sell, and to pay taxes. Only the State has the right to take our resources through taxation and redistribute them to those whose support it wishes to gain or those it wishes to weaken by creating habits of dependency - such as foreign governments and mothers.
The Patriarchal economy is the economy of Hierarchy - a mixture of the exchange economy and the command economy. It is enforced with egotism and violence.
In the past fifty years we have seen women brought under Patriarchal domination as never before. In the two hundred years up to the Second World War the great Liberal project was to smash the autonomous power of the peasantry, whether they be Chinese, African, Russian, Scots Highlanders or Red Indians through land expropriation, taxation and conscription of men into armies and forced labour. In the past fifty years or so we have seen the assimilation of women into the Patriarchy, through the destruction of the family and the monetarization of both domestic activity and the care of the young and old and sick.
Our grandmothers lived almost entirely within matriarchal parameters - theirs was a gift economy. They were not paid in money - tax tokens - and except for what they were given by their husbands, they lived cash free existences. They cared for the young and the old, they grew food and cooked food, washed clothes, mended clothes, made clothes.
The Gift Economy was at the centre of women's existence. In her children she gave the future to the human race.
Women's natural activity, her giving, is central to human life. Woman's Gift is the core of human society. It is the Gift of Love, not the Exchange of Egotism, nor the Demand of Domination.It is the Gift that is the absolute essential for our well-being, both woman and man alike.
The agents of the State, the Vichy Feminists and their fellow travellers, the ideologues of the overseer class, forever seek to belittle the Gift. They seek to replace it with their own degradation, that of reward and punishment, that of compulsion.
At Christmas time we celebrate the Economy of the Poor, the God of the Powerless, the Gift of Woman, the Gift of Our Lady, the Mother of God.