The Secret Truth Behind the "War on Christmas"

The Truth Behind the “War on Christmas”

Of course, you know there is no war on Christmas and never was. The folks who claim otherwise are the slice of America that bemoans the Most Favored Religion status that Christianity had half a century ago. You know, religious pageants by all the kids at the PUBLIC school (including the kids whose parents were trying to teach them a different religion, or wanted their kids to have only science as their guide to life. The latter is sad, but certainly it is every parent’s right to not have a religion shoved down their children’s throats.). Christian religious decorations all over the schools. Christian religious symbols all over public, paid for by your tax dollars, government buildings, where the whole community needs to enter to receive a dog license, contest an easement or just go to work. Easter (not Spring) Break, which followed a Christian religious holiday.

Eventually, when enough new Justices were added, people who revered the Constitution and its hallowed separation of Church and State, the Supremes decided that it was all too egregiously unconstitutional. Hallelujah, said the vast majority of devout Christians, who could see the dangers to their religion in becoming a de-facto State Faith. Religion is irredeemably damaged when it gets wrapped around political power. Examples abound, both today and in previous centuries. [Email me PRIVATELY for details.]

The reason you can say Merry Christmas to someone and that someone has no idea what you really mean is because Dec 25 is a secular, civil holiday for the entire nation of citizens, as well as a religious holiday for a slice of those citizens, and the word “Christmas” has been appended to BOTH of them. If you say Merry Christmas you could be wishing someone a happy secular, civil holiday – or you could be greeting a co-religionist. You could be greeting a co-religionist and wishing them a happy BOTH holidays. Is this crazy? Ya sure, you betcha.

HOW did we get to this crazy state of affairs? The way we get to most messes: a cabal of people tried to get ascendency by grabbing power, not by earning respect. In this case, a group of Christian lawmakers thought of a clever way to make their religious holiday a national holiday – establishing their religion as the State Faith without being so overt about it that even a conservative Supreme Court couldn’t stomach it. The law establishing Dec 25th as a national, civic – secular! – holiday stated that Christmas was a holiday that was about family (not religion) and as such was embraced by all corners and segments of American society. It wasn’t true then, but the law made it so!

And that, dear devout and religious Christians, is why you can’t “Put Christ in Christmas” unless you are talking about your private religious celebrations, where he’s pretty well entrenched, you’ll have to admit. No, you can’t get Christ into a secular, civil holiday because – establishing your religion is unconstitutional in the USA. The national shopping, eating, visiting-family, commercial holiday with Frosty and Rudolph belongs to We the People. It’s a civic holiday and capitalism and customers can do whatever we like with it. THAT is the result of your co-religionists trying to pull a fast one with the US Constitution a century ago. Let that lesson sink in, really, really deeply. The reason that Christmas is no longer exclusively a day that a religious leader was born is 100% your own damn fault. 100%. You created this mess. It’s all on you. And this is one genie you will never, ever get back into the bottle.

You COULD repeal the designation of Dec 25 as a national holiday and have it return to just being a personal-choice day that religiously-inclined people can ASK their employers for [no guarantees, and it is close to the end of most companies’ fiscal year, so – good luck with that], but neither you nor the rest of us will get a paid holiday. Much less Dec 24th, Dec 26th or any other day prior to New Year’s. Wanna start using your personal vacation time to have a day or two off and skip the whole family travel thing? Hmm? Didn’t think so.

Neither will the rest of the overworked, exhausted 350 million rest of us who look forward to the only long Federally-encouraged family time off from work.

Because of the confusion with both holidays using the same words, people who are not aggressively trying to get back those halcyon days of unconstitutionality – which includes Christians who want to protect their religion as well as those of other, or no, faith tradition – coined the respectful Happy Holidays, to acknowledge that civil holiday, as well as Yule (Wiccans & other Neo-Pagans), Solstice (everyone), Hanukkah (Jews) and Bodhi Day (Buddhists). Respect is the foundation of a law-based, justice-focused democratic society. Respect is good.

And why do I say “Christians who want to protect their religion”? Well, if a holiday is purely religious, you have control of it. If you allow the name and the date to be used as a national secular holiday, then it belongs to all of us, and that includes Madison Avenue, the retail industry, Hollywood and any and all other commercial ideas that the human mind can think up.

you really follow the teachings of that marvelous, inspirational Jewish Palestinian construction worker of two millennia ago, start campaigning for a national, secular Yule Holiday on the 21st, or the 26th or some other late-December day [we need a long holiday close to New Year so we can have that family and rest time], so you can have your religious holiday back. The only thing you can’t have: Your religious ancestors wanted to force everyone to celebrate their religious holiday, as a way of either converting us all, or rubbing our faces in a de-facto theocracy.

Them days are gone for good, no matters what lies a President or politician tries to spin. You can’t slip a theocracy past the Supremes in the 21st Century, even a pack of Republican Justices. But you can put Christ back into a new exclusively-religious holiday. Heck, you could even move it back to when the Messiah was actually born – late March or early April. We’ll still have Christmas, that “family holiday enjoyed by all sectors of American society. “

Deck the halls with boughs of whatever and happy eggnog to us all, every one!

Trying to Pull a Fast One a Century Ago, Bites the Conniving Sneaks in the Butt – A Lesson for Us All, Every One.

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!

5 Ways to Boost Your Energy, Boost Your Joy, Lose Weight AND Much More!

 One of my constant refrains in my group coaching as well as individual programs is that joy comes from learning new things. If you haven't done any significant non-career learning in a while, this probably sounds .

So here's my suggestion: trust me enough to try it. Options are endless. There are practical classes (what to do when the next disaster strikes; how to fly-fish, etc), and there are fascinating, intellectually-stimulating classes (how did the early Christians evolve their idea that Jesus was god; how did dinosaurs evolve into birds; how to write engaging travel stories for your family to enjoy).

What they all have in common is that they are engaging (you are thinking about them, not politics, the bills, your teenagers, your boss or the job market), and they are FUN.  When you spend time having fun and learning, as opposed to fun that you’ve done many times before (watch football on TV), you make more areas in your brain work.  You particularly make your hippocampus, where memory is stored, work hard.  The harder it works, the larger it gets.  New neurons emerge from neuronal stem cells if you work your hippocampus enough.  [Stress kills neurons and shrinks your hippocampus.] 

As you move through life, you tend to get into habits and routines, so your brain starts to “coast.”  When you are not learning new things, you invite cognitive decline to make a home, a process that doesn’t wait until you are in your 60s, please note!  I totally get why most of us don’t want to go into Learner Mode.  A Learner, by definition, hasn’t got a clue what’s going on. Do you enjoy that lost and clueless feeling?  No, course, not.  THAT, dear friends, more than the “I don’t have time to have fun” is the real reason why Learning isn’t compelling.  If we’re honest, those of us who “don’t have time” do make time for sitcoms and sports.   

Do you have any idea how many dinosaur species you get to learn about and try to remember in the Paleontology: How Therapod Dinosaurs Became Birds class from U of Alberta on Coursera?  A lot. I wasn’t taking it for a grade, so who cares how many times I take the tests before I get it?  Just trying to remember as much as possible was enough of a workout to kick my hippocampus’ butt.  Man, was that fascinating!  Hubby and I couldn’t tear ourselves away, every evening for a week.  And it was FREE. 

You want your hippocampus as robust as possible if you are going to avoid Alzheimer’s, and besides, learning is FUN. 

So here’s my challenge to you all:  One night this week, turn the TV off, get the kids to do their chores, and sit down at your Internet and research:

·        **  Coursera – where I do my dinosaur study, and many others learn history, language, writing, and on and on.  Most classes are FREE.  I've learned from Laura.com, but that's mostly work-related, not fun.  I have heard good things about Udemy, but haven't taken anything there.

·        ** The Great Courses – which aren’t free, but are regularly discounted, and many libraries carry some of them.  I bought How Jesus Became God and was amazingly enlightened at hundreds of years of conceptual evolution on just exactly who Jesus was, and if he was god, when he became god.  Whatever your actual beliefs, the history is can’t-stop-listening engrossing.

·       ** Local community centers  – where you can try something entirely different to give your hippocampus a real workout.  How about art?  [Can’t do it?  Great.  Skilled is what you are when you FINISH, not before you start!]  You can sign up for exercise classes while you’re at it.  My community center has a water slide that is open on Saturday mornings.  Just try to convince me that’s not fun.  You can’t.  Your head is shaking but your lips are curving up in an unconscious smile.  You know how much fun it is. 

·       **  Local community colleges will let you attend some classes without a grade.  If you want to attend Over 55/Senior college, you can, even if you’re not quite that experienced with life.  You don’t have to dye your hair grey and the yearly fee is only $125 in my town.

The key is to set aside your performance anxiety and your reluctance to be clumsy and dopey (as one of my clients put it).  Not knowing what you’re doing is the fog that clears as you work at it.  Working your brain and having fun doing it is the greatest rejuvenator of tired minds, hearts and souls, second only to physical exercise.  I combine the two by looking through crochet-pattern and art-instruction books while I fast-walk on a treadmill, 4 days a week.  [The other three I splash and laugh in water aerobics classes.  Not too much learning, but lots of movement; laughter reduces my cortisol load as well.]  When I emerge from my dinosaurs, or my crochet-treadmill, or my splashing, I have such a surge of energy, the “lost time” is more than made up in increased cleverness in solving problems and getting tasks done, and the enthusiasm to embrace all the boring and/or scary parts.  It’s easy to plunge in and just git ‘er done, when you have so much fun to get back to!

Next week: pick something to learn.

Week after: start it.  Get through the initial discomfort to break through to the “wow, that’s cool.”   The discomfort that has been scaring you for years might only last a minute!

Want to discover more ways to have fun with the same 24 hours you have now?  Call for a FREE Getting Unstuck session (not a sales pitch).  www.soaringdragon.biz