Donald Trump is touring the country on a self-proclaimed Victory Lap, telling audiences that when he is President, they will be able to say Merry Christmas to each other instead of the let’s-include-all-Americans Happy Holidays greeting. His real message is that religious Christians have been oppressed and suppressed by the insistence on recognizing that Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and atheists are Americans too, and deserve courtesy and respect. Absurd. Everyone modifies their message for who they are talking to, from Presidents on down.
But the whole “Keep Christ in Christmas” movement forgets one supremely important – and instructive – point and that is: There are two completely separate holidays being celebrated on the same day and having the same name! There is, of course, the religious holiday and there is the secular holiday.
Let’s start with some facts about the religious holiday. The earliest Christians knew that Jesus was born in the last week of March or the first week of April, the two week lambing season when “shepherds are keeping watch over their flocks by night.” Nearly everyone knows that. For the 1st hundred years, the “birthday” was a solemn spiritual day, with prayers and (in some venues) fasting. Nearly everyone doesn’t know that Jesus’ Birthday was moved to December 25 because that was Mithras’ Birthday; this occurred as Christianity was becoming an empire-building political force, and co-opting existing faiths, through the coercion of Roman legions if need be, was the major proselytizing tool. Christians violently suppressed every other faith they came in contact with during that first millennium. My ancestors had been creating bonfires for Yule (Dec 21st) and getting blind drunk for eight days to two weeks. Along with excessive eating of yummy, unhealthy things and bringing fir trees indoors, which they continued to do when their rulers saw the power-advantages of going along and becoming nominally Christian.
So if you want to have a religious holiday, go to church services, don’t buy any presents or send any cards, don’t decorate the house or get a tree, stay indoors for 24 hours and pray. No TV, no matter who is playing who. Breathe, and pray. Silently or in your family group. For unto us a child is born. Pray.
That’s the religious holiday.
So how on Earth did we end up with another, completely separate holiday, completely (by law) secular and with the same dang name??? It’s an insane situation. The secular holiday should be moved to December 24 or 26th and called Winterfest or something. Or Jesus’ Birthday should be moved to spring. He might end up having a birthday and a death day very close to each other, which has a very satisfying symmetry, doesn’t it? The two holidays aren’t impossible to separate. The Unitarian Caroling group I’m part of sings lustily and enthusiastically at the mall for hours, providing outreach to people who’ve never met a Unitarian, and sticking strictly to the Frosty the Snowman genre of songs, of which there are a plethora. Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire has nothing whatever to do with a Middle Eastern guy/god who preached that all people are brothers and sisters, but it is a lovely
paean to the glories of winter in northern latitudes.
So, how did we end up in this silly mess?
We are experiencing the inevitable – absolutely inevitable – result of trying to pull a fast one. Every single time you connive and cheat, the result is going to be very, very bad for you. Call it karma, call it divine retribution, call it the human inability to see past the immediate goal that you want very much to the logical result of pulling that scam. Whatever your ideology is, the result is the same. Steal and you are going to get screwed. It may take a while but it will happen.
A century ago, just before the turn of the last century as I recall, a group of passionately Christian Congressmen with total contempt for the foundational American principle of separation of church and state, and every American’s right to live in a secular democracy, not a theocracy, got together and hatched a plan to circumvent the establishment clause of the US Constitution. As Phase 1 of a stealth plan to turn our beloved country into a Christians-only playground, they proposed a bill for a new national holiday. They wanted to make Christmas a national holiday, with mandated day off from work (or overtime pay) for all those good Christian folk who, until then, had to work on that supremely holy day. [As I still have to with my religious holidays, or take a personal day off, as is proper in a secular democracy where faith is a personal, not national, choice.] They also hoped that making that religious holiday a national holiday would be followed by making Easter and all other Christian holidays national holidays as well. [That was too much for the rest of Congress to swallow – and the Supreme Court, as conservative as it was, would never have gone along.]
They managed to pull their Christmas absurdity with a preamble stating that Christmas was a national family holiday, when families gathered and solidified their bonds – good for the country, appeals to patriotism, are you hearing the Amens yet? – and persons of all conditions and creeds bought presents and trees – appeals to business greed! – and so, a national celebration should be enshrined as a legal holiday. That had just enough stealth-verbiage to get through and get past the Supremes.
So – the reason religious Christians had their religious holiday turned into a market-economy extravaganza is that a bunch of religious zealots tried to violate the establishment clause. As a result of which, by law, their holiday was hijacked by the secular celebration. How we cope? Some people celebrate both holidays. Some people celebrate only the secular holiday. Jews took the insignificant Chanukkah and turned it into a major holiday so that their kids would have something to get, and get presents for, while all their friends are celebrating secular Christmas. They didn’t have to. “Christmas,” by law, belongs to all of us – trees, songs, lights, drinking and eating, being with family or being depressed because we don’t have family, decorating the house and lights, lights, Lights
.
So go ahead and celebrate the secular holiday. It belongs to you! And make a solemn vow, on December 25th and every day of the year that follows, to NOT take an ethical shortcut to your heart’s desire. It may take a hundred and twenty years to come home to roost, but it will. If you think you got away with it, it’s just your failure to perceive how the earthquake your ethics-shortcut set off will bring some aspect of your life tumbling down, down the temporal road. Play fair and you’ll never have the personal equivalent of this Christmas mess in your life.
Happy Holidays! Merry Secular Christmas to all!
