The Drink at Work.com Editorial on the So-Called "War on Christmas"
Hey, remember the classic Rankin-Bass cartoon where a cabal of religious fanatics, shifty politicians, progressive zealots and slimy lawyers almost ruined Christmas by using it as fuel for an idealogical war? No? That's because nobody fucking made that special, and frankly, I don't feel like living it now.
Look, I used to believe in Santa Claus AND Jesus. If I don't anymore, so what? You know what's common between all of the holidays that are celebrated around this time? Ideas like good will, hope, giving, humor, love, fellowship, family, joy and honesty. All the stuff we're supposed to pay attention to all year round, but forget until it gets cold as balls outside and you realize you can buy a DVD player for a dollar. Does it really fucking matter if I say "Merry Christmas" to a Muslim graphic designer or "Season's Greetings" to a Baptist hunter? Do you really think I'm saying, "Hey, go fuck yourself, this holiday belongs to my people." Maybe, just maybe, I'm trying to be nice for one goddamn minute and maybe you should take the fucking compliment. Do we need Dennis Hastert making sure everyone calls the tree at the White House by it's Christian name? Is that what we're paying him for? Do we really think that Judge Alito will be a great Supreme Court Justice because he wants to "save Christmas"? From what? Santa? According to The Year without a Santa Claus and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Kringle's the only one I remember trying to shut down the holiday. And even if I'm a member of the ACLU and an atheist, do I still need progressives working overtime to get nativities out of my view?
For the love of Tom Skerritt, please stop! All of you. Drop your case, burn your speeches and dig that coat you never wear out of your closet and give it to someone who needs it. Call your mother and tell her what kind of dessert you're bringing to the family dinner. Go outside simply because it's cold and watch your breath. Talk to someone you would normally ignore just because you feel giddy. Watch cartoons with your kids and tell them about how you used to watch the same ones with your older brother before you stopped talking to each other...and then go call him. Go to the holiday celebration of a friend from a different faith. Do something that you can look back on and feel good about.
December is such a bizarre mish-mesh of religious ceremonies, pagan rituals and seasonal necessities anyway, is there any reason to get into such a snit over other people not celebrating it like you, or celebrating it too much or not celebrating it at all? I don't like the commercialism of this season either, but I don't like American overconsumption year-round so I'm not going to pin it on any one holiday. And Christians, I'm sorry, but you don't own Christmas anymore, even if you did name it after your boy. It's freeware now, so get over it.
So come this Christmas I'll be eating razzle-berry dressing, playing with my nieces, watching stop-motion characters overcome holiday hurdles and drinking with my husband, my brothers and good friends. I may even pause a moment to think, "You know, fuck it, that Jesus story is a good one with a good message. Still, I wish it would be cool for me to have a bris for my kid one day. That's a nice ceremony aside from the actual circumcision part of it."
Of course, all of this leads me to giggle, just a little, over the holiday cards I designed for the hunting and fishing magazine that employs me. Inside they read, "Season's Greetings." Ha! Bring it on, Bubba!
Happy freakin' holidays, you bastards.
Look, I used to believe in Santa Claus AND Jesus. If I don't anymore, so what? You know what's common between all of the holidays that are celebrated around this time? Ideas like good will, hope, giving, humor, love, fellowship, family, joy and honesty. All the stuff we're supposed to pay attention to all year round, but forget until it gets cold as balls outside and you realize you can buy a DVD player for a dollar. Does it really fucking matter if I say "Merry Christmas" to a Muslim graphic designer or "Season's Greetings" to a Baptist hunter? Do you really think I'm saying, "Hey, go fuck yourself, this holiday belongs to my people." Maybe, just maybe, I'm trying to be nice for one goddamn minute and maybe you should take the fucking compliment. Do we need Dennis Hastert making sure everyone calls the tree at the White House by it's Christian name? Is that what we're paying him for? Do we really think that Judge Alito will be a great Supreme Court Justice because he wants to "save Christmas"? From what? Santa? According to The Year without a Santa Claus and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Kringle's the only one I remember trying to shut down the holiday. And even if I'm a member of the ACLU and an atheist, do I still need progressives working overtime to get nativities out of my view?
For the love of Tom Skerritt, please stop! All of you. Drop your case, burn your speeches and dig that coat you never wear out of your closet and give it to someone who needs it. Call your mother and tell her what kind of dessert you're bringing to the family dinner. Go outside simply because it's cold and watch your breath. Talk to someone you would normally ignore just because you feel giddy. Watch cartoons with your kids and tell them about how you used to watch the same ones with your older brother before you stopped talking to each other...and then go call him. Go to the holiday celebration of a friend from a different faith. Do something that you can look back on and feel good about.
December is such a bizarre mish-mesh of religious ceremonies, pagan rituals and seasonal necessities anyway, is there any reason to get into such a snit over other people not celebrating it like you, or celebrating it too much or not celebrating it at all? I don't like the commercialism of this season either, but I don't like American overconsumption year-round so I'm not going to pin it on any one holiday. And Christians, I'm sorry, but you don't own Christmas anymore, even if you did name it after your boy. It's freeware now, so get over it.
So come this Christmas I'll be eating razzle-berry dressing, playing with my nieces, watching stop-motion characters overcome holiday hurdles and drinking with my husband, my brothers and good friends. I may even pause a moment to think, "You know, fuck it, that Jesus story is a good one with a good message. Still, I wish it would be cool for me to have a bris for my kid one day. That's a nice ceremony aside from the actual circumcision part of it."
Of course, all of this leads me to giggle, just a little, over the holiday cards I designed for the hunting and fishing magazine that employs me. Inside they read, "Season's Greetings." Ha! Bring it on, Bubba!
Happy freakin' holidays, you bastards.
posted by Carol at 9:53 AM
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19 Comments:
I say we really piss them off and rename December 25 National American Flag Burning Day.
HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
You know, for warmth. That actually reminds me of a Kids in the Hall sketch with Buddy Cole where he says, "There's some hubbub down south about some wag burning the flag. Jesus. Up here we burn our flag all the time to keep warm."
I lift my morning gin & tonic to you in salute. Hear, hear!
Not sure when the subtext for "Merry Christmas" became "Fuck You!" but I'll chalk it up to the O'Reilly Factor ("what to fear and who to blame").
very nice.
Amen. Right on. Whatever is the right word for a non-religious (but not anti-religious) tract that manages to get it all right.
Join my carnival of hate, drink at workers.
You referred to it as freeware, but it seems more like abandonware to me, at least as far as any original Christian/pagan contexts are concerned.
Allow me to return to my Baptist roots and say: "Preach it, sistah!"
About once a week, there's a letter to the editor in my local newspaper whining about how "the secularists are killing Christmas" and it makes me seethe with rage every time.
We have soldiers in Iraq that are too busy ferretting out terrorists to spend time with their families. There are homeless people watching some brat scream for an XBox while wondering where his next meal is coming from. There are kids sick with cancer and hoping Santa will remember to visit them in the hospital.
And we are arguing over the semantics of "Merry Christmas?!"
And when someone tries to tell me this in person, I shove my pentacle in his/her face and inform them that I'm a pagan. All the pretty Christmas trappings s/he enjoys were mine before they here his/hers. So I don't care that they are around and I definitely don't want to hear their whining.
And they should get the hell over themselves. "Yeah, you go to church. So do a lot of people. Doesn't make you special."
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go make my donation to Child's Play.
As a Jew, I'm actually very in favor of the return to use of "Christmas" rather than the generic "Holidays" this time of year, even if the "movement" to "protect Christmas" may have its roots in some objectionable places.
Mostly, I don't like the notion of "Happy Holidays" in its (inevitable) commerical context because it tends to blur all these seasonal events together. And, my holiday is not your holiday. My holiday is about a national liberation struggle, half-ass "miracles" about oil, and, consequently, a license to eat fried potatoes. Your holiday is presumably about the birth of a very important historical figure whom some people believe to have been God. Different stuff.
And the gift-giving thing that has been given or abandoned as 'freeware' or 'abandonware' to the culture at large, I don't want it. When I was a kid, the Christians did their thing, and we got a dreidel and chocolate covered in tin foil. This was as it should be. The payoff is that we didn't have to get sucked in to the Thanksgiving-to-Christmas commerical juggernaut/hysteria that swept the rest of the country.
"Happy Holidays" was not some invention of the ACLU to protect the feelings of the Jewish, the Muslim, the Hindu, the secular, or the neo-pagan, but a commercialist trick to suck us into the corrupted Christmas game by pretending that all this rampant gift-giving was somehow a result of it being December, rather than because of a peculiar (and relatively recent) Western mode of observing a particular Christian holiday.
"Merry Christmas" -- take it back!
I understand your point but please don't think that everyone who celebratres Christmas has somehow been suckered into honoring shopping. My favorite Christmas moments--both as a kid and an adult--are decorating the tree, making Christmas cookies, looking at all the lights and displays in NYC, watching Rankin-Bass cartoons and getting together with family, whether it's mine or my wife's. Sure, gifts are nice, but that's not really where the joy of the holiday is derived or why so many people look forward to this season.
Having never been to one, how does a bris differ from a baptism, other than "the actual circumcision part of it?" (And the Christian analogue of water on the forehead.) Is there a big party? As one of the many circumsized, non-Jew, American males, I don't want to think I got the worst of a bris without the best.
You know, it's funny. I may have never been to a christening. So in truth, I'm not terribly sure how they differ. In the church I grew up in, you weren't baptised shortly after birth (though we may actually have been christened since my dad was Methodist...I was the last child, so heck if I know). Baptism was reserved for a time when one was old enough to understand Jesus' sacrifice and your role in the church. For me, that was apparently age 9. Odd.
I've been to one bris and what I liked about it was the ceremony about the naming of the child. It was a very casual gathering, but each person in the family had written something about the child's name, what it meant, and what they hoped for him. It was very moving. So that's what I was talking about. But some Christians may well do this kind of thing too. Anyone know?
I'm glad you liked the other parts of the bris, Carol, but without "the actual circumcision part of it," it would have really lost its raison-d'etre
I'm getting to hate this time of year for all the political correctness and the opposing fatwa by the Evangelical nutjobs...as well as for the rampant commercialization. As a liberal Christian (that is not an oxymoron), I do celebrate the Christian religious holiday, but certainly don't feel the need to force this on everyone else. Let's face it, the "Christmas" most people celebrate is as much about Jesus Christ as it is about Jesus Alou. In the spirit of the season, do NOT put a Lexus with a big fucking red bow in someone's garage. Take a deep breath and do something for someone who really needs help, support, or merely a kind word.
Does it really fucking matter if I say "Merry Christmas" to a Muslim graphic designer or "Season's Greetings" to a Baptist hunter?
Er... how big is his gun, and how many flags does he have on his truck?
I've been to one bris and what I liked about it was the ceremony about the naming of the child. It was a very casual gathering, but each person in the family had written something about the child's name, what it meant, and what they hoped for him. It was very moving. So that's what I was talking about. But some Christians may well do this kind of thing too. Anyone know?
I'd also ask the opposite question, how traditional was the bris you attended? Did the parents cut down on the formality, or add the little saying of hopes?
Again, I haven't been to one. As for baptisms, I've been to the baptisms of my cousins, but that would be nearing two decades ago. And if you want the New Jersey, Italian-American, Roman Catholic perspective, Ces can probably describe it better than I. I just remember a mass with a baptism, and then a gathering at the parents' house afterward.
I'm with you 99%, but please, can you give Alabama a break man? We're trying to get a new image - and some of us (*B'ham specifically*) are succeeding. The last thing we need is the rest of the country making even more fun at us than we already have. Cause you know what? I can be an atheist and a member of the ACLU and still live in Alabama.
There are lucid minds here man...
Hey, man, I know. I love Alabama. I love Birmingham. And I often write here about the cool things going on there. I defend Alabama when people who have never been there make lame jokes about it. And of course there are plenty of enlightened intelligent, folk there, not the least of which are my family and friends. Still, that doesn't change the fact that at one point in time I did feel trapped by it and needed to leave. I enjoy and respect Alabama much more now, and leaving was a big part of that.
However, if you aren't familiar with what I've been writing on this site for a while, that line probably did come off as a flippant dismissal of the entire state. So you make a fair point. Perhaps I'll remove that phrase, as it's not really even necessary. Thanks for reading.
Wait a minute, Rankin Bass DID make "'Twas the Night Before Christmas" back in the late 70's, in which Christmas was ALMOST ruined by an atheistic mouse's letter to the editor of a local paper. The welcoming Christmas clock ALMOST didn't work. Santa ALMOST skipped the unwelcoming town. And I think there was a cranky mayor in there and maybe some lawyers. So that's as close as we'll probably get.
Neither "Merry Christmas" nor "Happy Holidays" nor "Seasons Greetings" nor "Happy New Year" should be taken in any sort of negative context by anyone. We should probably just be happy that people in our society are saying something to people they come in contact with - usually such conversations are limited to shop workers having to hear someone talk on their cell phone.
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