EX-MAS

© 11/21/2006, 11/25/10. All rights reserved.

(The following was submitted to Richmond "Style Weekly" at least twice, but no reply was ever received from editor Scott Bass, who seems congenitally unable to respond as a normal, polite human being.)

Well, it is about that time of the year again.  No, I don’t mean the raging guilt-trip that drives the Christmas-shopping bus!  I am referring to the predictable whinging about the loss of the “true meaning of Christmas” that descends upon us less-than-thou each December harder than Brenda Lee’s recurrent, incessant bleating to go “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree.”

The Saints Among Us just cannot restrain themselves from casting righteous blame upon us heathens for gleefully contributing to the loss of said “true meaning” with our incessant secularization of what is deemed almost exclusively a Christian holy event.  In order to prove it, they rant in high dudgeon about the renaming of the “Christmas” trees as “Holiday” trees, declaring that such political correctness (“PC”) is unworthy of a (mostly) Christian nation that indisputably owes its very 230+ -year-old existence to Jesus of Nazareth, a guy who's allegedly been dead for about 2000 years!

To be sure, Merriam-Webster’s “New International Dictionary, Unabridged” (2d Ed.—the "Holy Grail" of dictionaries) notes that the word “Christmas” is a derivative of the words “Christ” and “Mass,” presumably referring to the Communion sacrament celebrated on Christmas Day in the Roman Catholic Church and its earlier predecessors.   So, OK, “Christmas” is a Christian event.

HOWEVER---

The organized Christian church was formed long after the said alleged death of Jesus, and it demanded unquestioned literal belief in hearsay writings by those who never knew him.  The “New Testament” was so decreed by the Synod of Hippo in 383 CE, which gathering also dispensed with those clearly unreliable Gnostic Gospels and other "inconvenient" writings about early Christianity that just might not fit the authoritarian precepts of the early Roman church.  The Gospel According To Luke contains one of the most beautiful pieces of literature known to any of us with its well-remembered story of the birth of Jesus as set forth in the King James Version, the one I learned as a child.

Nevertheless, as learned astronomers and others have pointed out, the shepherds would not likely have been out in the fields tending their flocks at night in late December!  No, if the events described in the Gospel of Luke are correct, then the supposed birth of Jesus would have likely occurred in the spring along with the births of many other animals.  The naked baby Jesus might have gotten very cold in that feed trough in the manger if he had been born in December, swaddling-cloths or not.

Early Christians in Europe had observed local pagans having a very good time in December celebrating the completion of the harvest and the turn of the sun to longer days following the Winter Solstice.  People all over the Northern Hemisphere had been celebrating these occurrences for thousands of years, probably, and the early Christian hierarchy realized that, in order to subject these pagans to Christian control, they had to hijack the pagan festivals, the Winter Solstice, or Yule Festival, first and foremost.

So, those early Christians merely “adjusted” their calendar a bit and made the Winter Solstice Festival happily coincide with a new legend about the birth of Jesus.  The bit about the shepherds in the field didn’t really matter since everybody in Europe figured it was warmer down south in “Asia Minor.”

The practice of decorating a cut evergreen tree was a pagan custom at one time but it, too, was hijacked by the Christian power structure to become a symbol of the church.  As the influence and political power of The Church grew in Europe over time, it eagerly embraced the intolerance that is a fundamental part of the human condition and which so many others have come to suffer.  Pagan celebrations were outlawed, and witches and other infidels were tortured and burned and otherwise killed off lest they “infect” the ignorant masses with their "untruths."  Keeping the masses ignorant and credulous allowed The Church to maintain political control (and the cashflow).  It may have been nearly impossible for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but the very wealthy church hierarchy were obviously already in, anyway.

Following World War II, the annual Christmas shopping spree took off with a vengeance.  Families had much more disposable income and time off to go shopping.  The advance of suburbia and shopping centers and malls accelerated the process, notwithstanding the once-powerful magic of downtown department stores and photos of expectant children on Santa's knee.  Many could be reassured that they were doing the Lord’s work by ensuring that retailers and their employees would have a nice Christmas, too.

Having worked retail in several places in the past, I know from personal experience that many retailers lose money until the Christmas shopping season.  Christmas shopping is absolutely essential to the health of the US economy. Don’t believe otherwise for a minute!

These days, some PC types try to be all-inclusive with due observances of the various winter festivals going on: Christmas, Kwanza’a, Chanukah, etc.  What’s a well-meaning business to do but refer to its trees and decorations as “holiday” whatever?  This seems to annoy the True Believers who will brook no variance: they intend to put the “Christ” back in Christmas with an in-your-face, jut-jawed declaration that such stuff is “CHRISTMAS” stuff, not “HOLIDAY” stuff!  And anybody who doesn’t like it can kiss their you-know-what!  Howwzat for the holidays?  “Up yours” for Jesus!  "Holiday," by the way, is a contraction of "holy day."  It's just not as obvious to quasi-literate "good Christians."

Whatever the rest of us do, we’d better not stand in the way of those hyper-pious True Believers who intend to jam “Christmas” down our godless, pagan throats no matter what.  It is not enough that they have been in almost total control of the US political and economic system, but any spineless government or retail PC schmuck who wants to practice a little tolerance had better get out of the way!  It is “Christmas” or else, guys, and we are either with them or against them, as one of our Presidents has famously suggested.

Speaking of who said what, it is well to remember one of my favorite songs written by Kinky Friedman: “They Don’t Make Jews Like Jesus Anymore.”

Happy Holidays!