I’m headed back to the wilds of northern Chicagoland to spend the holiday weekend with my folks, and I’m not likely to sit in front of a computer again before Monday. So I just wanted to wish all of my loyal readers the merriest most carefully non-observant of Christmases non-denominational winter fesivals.
Seriously, I would like to take a moment if I might to address the “War on Christmas.” I’ve been avoiding it, because it’s hardly the case that there’s a lack of coverage of the liberal side of this issue, but I want to say, right now, that it’s beyond ludicrous that grown men and women actually think there’s a sinister plot to discredit and invalidate the Christmas holiday.
Let me use myself as a case example. I am, as many of you know, a ridiculously strident atheist. Despite that, Christmas is my favorite holiday of the entire year (barring less-traditional celebrations like B-Fest and Monty Python Day). This has never caused me any difficulty or consternation or confusion, because to me, Christmas is not and has never been a celebration of the (incorrectly dated) birth of a (historically uncertain) Nazarene baby. It’s about the whole “friends and family and love and charity and humanity” gloppiness typified in something like Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.
The fact is, prior to Victorian England, Christmas wasn’t much of a holiday at all. Fundamentalists decried it as near-heresy, and for much of the history of the Roman Catholic Church, it was effectively just one more saint’s day, although in this case it was less about a saint and more about the mortal son of God. It was the Victorian Christmas cult (spearheaded by…Charles Dickens) that codified most of the feasting, caroling and good fellowship that means “the Christmas season” to most Westerners today. And while the Victorians were not an unreligious sort, they were no more overwhelmingly Christian than America today (hell, probably less).
It’s fine to bitch about the commercialization of Christmas, and within my lifetime I can recall Evangelicals doing just that (20 years ago, nobody would have been upset that Wal-Mart greeters weren’t force-feeding consumers cod-Christianity with every cart distributed). But here’s a fact: almost everyone I know, and many of them are atheists, agnostics, humanists or non-Christians, will be spending December 25th with their loved ones. Not, perhaps, a massive family get-together; but a day with the kids is just as good, if not better. Most of those people will be happy to be doing it. And I don’t think a single one of them would even notice if a sales clerk greeted them with “Happy Holidays.” Anyway, that phrase is just a shorthand for, “right now, I hope you’re able to put the dreariness of the world to the side. Because for a couple of days a year, it’s nice to not have to focus on it.” I don’t need to believe in a mythopoetic baby to find that a sentiment worth getting behind.
God bless us, every one.