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The mid-winter solstice festival is by far the biggest celebration of Surrealism. It’s the time when we change the atmosphere of our homes with decorations as most of us merrily become consummate Surrealists. I’ve already used term ‘surreal’ five times and we’re only three sentences into this article, so it seems sensible to drop in a definition before we go on to appreciate just how surreal a traditional Christmas is…
Typically, Surrealist artists use imagery that’s intended to baffle the rational mind while stimulating the subconscious. They are fascinated by the hidden meanings of dreams and finding ways to share the inner realities of individuals. Much of their art, therefore, deals with layers of reality where one thing can represent or suggest another thing and its meaning may be reassigned by juxtaposing it with something else. Thus they are interested in symbolism, Freudian analysis, and how complex concepts could be represented by diagrams, metaphor, and mathematical formulae. For a fuller definition of Surrealism, see this article previously published in Signifier: Do You Know What’s Really Surreal?
Charles Dickens pretty much invented Christmas as we know it in his short novel A…
