When I first heard about putting the Christ back into Christmas I was excited that Christians were going to finally advocate some Christian things... maybe they wanted us to volunteer this advent season. Or maybe they wanted us to give all the money we would have spent on presents to a charity. Clearly I should have known better to think anything like this would be advocated if Jerry Falwell is involved. They aren't saying that we should take the average $767 that Americans planned on spending this Christmas on furbies and i-pods and donate it. No, they are saying that we should buy Christmas cards and Christmas trees from stores that wish us a Merry Christmas. That is how we can put Christ back into Christmas. If I hear one more thing about the "putting Christ back into Christmas" controversy I'm going to steal every baby jesus from every nativity scene I can find and burn them all in a large formation that says "Happy Holidays!"
Not that it takes much to make me want to start a baby jesus bonfire, but seriously these people are driving me nuts. Who cares that big-box chain stores say Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas? Who cares that George Bush's christmas cards don't say "Merry Christmas?" Who cares that tree in front of the Capitol is a Christmas tree and not a "Holiday" tree? Idiots. That's who cares about these things. I can almost guarantee that this whole thing started when some bored conservative wanted to raise a ruckus and couldn't find any gay people to persecute nor any planned parenthoods to picket.
But maybe I am being too harsh. Perhaps it is true that every time an underpaid cashier at Walmart says "Happy Holidays" the bright and shining meaning of Christmas dims just a little. Yeah right. And maybe Christ was actually born on the 25th of December. Saying "Happy Holidays" doesn't demean Christmas at all because Christmas isn't really all that Christian. Christmas is capitalism first and Jesus second. It's a pagan holiday that was co-opted by the early Christian church, and then later co-opted by some department store genius. And you know what, I enjoy it more that way. Many Christmas traditions in and of themselves don't require any sort of faith in any religion to enjoy them. It's mainly about being with your family, eating fatty food, liking the smell of pine, getting presents, and spending money.
I could put Christ into Christmas, but then I'd be lame and preachy. Instead I think I may start my own campaign. It's called "Put the Happy in 'Happy Holidays'" Step one is to burn an effigy of Jerry Falwell. I'm unclear of what comes next, but I'm open to suggestion.
3 comments:
Not that I would know, considering that I killed your lord, but isn't Christmas not about presents?
Isn't it about the birth of Jesus?
And didn't the tradition of gift giving originate in order to make typhus-ridden, farm-working children feel good for one day out of the year?
I think we should all (by us, i mean the christians) stop writing gift lists, and see just what bad gift givers our loved ones are. It's bound to spark some new animosities!
Yeah technically Christmas is about Jesus' birth, except for most scholars agree that Jesus probably wasn't born in December, and many Christmas traditions (misteltoe, the tree, the yule log, the gift giving) actually stem from druid celebrations of the solstice. The church adopted some of those customs to encourage more druid conversions/make the conversions easier. However, most of those traditions weren't fully embraced by all Christians (Christmas celebrations were actually banned by the Puritans), and it hasn't been until the past 200 years that many of these traditions have become "Christian." But yes, I think that we should focus on the the poor gift-giving choices of our families. Let me submit my dad's present to my mother in xmas '95 as an example: a frying pan and two vacuum cleaners.
Post a Comment