Let’s talk turkey: Banksy sends season’s greetings, snow is not on the card

On the wall is painted a child, kitted out for winter in coat, cap and mittens. Head raised, tongue stuck out catching snowflakes. But follow the scene on the adjoining wall and it turns out it’s not snow, but ash rising out of a dumpster fire. This powerful painting is by the elusive Banksy, who ‘bombs’ cities with provocative graffiti that has acquired a cult following. This time he has targeted Port Talbot, one of the most polluted towns in the UK. Like many Indian cities, it is ridden with respiratory problems. Banksy’s season’s greeting card to this sooty town, is about our children as well.

Of course not all the children of the world expect to be visited by snow this season. Actually even the song White Christmas, arguably the most successful song in music history, was written in sunny California. It’s the dream of someone sitting amidst green grass and swaying palm trees, of hearing sleigh bells in the snow. But a white Christmas is not the only perfect Christmas. So from India to Australia, Jerusalem to Mexico City, why should Christmas imagery remain overshadowed by whiteness? More diversity will be more fit.

The lived reality of the festival is colourfully heterogeneous. Take turkey which many thanks to Dickens’s Scrooge, whose atonement to his clerk is in the shape of an outsized bird, sometimes sounds like the centrepiece of all Christmas tables – but that’s hardly so. In plenty of homes this place of honour is reserved for biryani, or appam and stew, or tamales, or prawns and lobster, or curried goat and so on. What the Banksy child is really reaching out for is joy, and a healthier Earth.