And sure enough, there it was today! Here are a few thoughts of my own on the matter of Christian festivals.
I would prefer it if the adverts were kept to the 12 days before Christmas but that's not going to happen. It would be great if Christmas wasn't an orgy of buying but it is. It would be just as great if Christmas had more to do with religion.
I recognise 3 distinct types of Christians:
- Real Christians go to church, do good things in the community and live by their faith.
- Kinda Christians go to church for weddings, funerals and christenings and sometimes at Christmas.
- Kid-on Christians tick the box on the form that says Christian but don't ever go to church and get very worked up at the idea of people like Jews and Moslems having their own festivals to celebrate at Christmas time.
For 'Christians' in the list above you can substitute 'Jews' or 'Moslems.' The area I live in has quite a high Jewish population but I reckon about half of my Jewish neighbours are what I would call 'cultural' Jews (a bit like the Kinda Christians I described above) and not religious Jews. That's their choice. I imagine there are also Kinda Moslems out there too.
I'm an atheist. I don't care what you call any of these festivals. I don't celebrate Christmas but I do celebrate the national holiday we all share round about then. And I always have done, despite growing up in a family of socialists and communists.
As a child, I had great Christmases and they all had to do with presents. We really only got presents on 3 occasions in the year back then: birthdays (real presents), the first Sunday in May (mainly summer clothes) and Christmas (winter clothes and a lot of toys and books). Other than that, there was just August when we got kitted out for the return to school. Hard to get excited about that even back then.
By the way, I reckon one of the big steps forward we've made in the last generation or two has been the sale of cheap clothes, especially for kids. Viva Primark, Asda and Matalan! Great clothes and great colours. Easy to wash. Wee boys' joggers - 4 quid. Wee girls' party dresses - 8 quid. And when they wear out, as they do, these cheapo clothes can go in the recycling and we'll buy something new.
Christmas to us looked like this:
This was my first Christmas - I was 9 months old!
So who in the world says 'Happy Holidays' instead of Merry Christmas? Nobody in the UK, that I'm sure of. Is it a US thing or a Canadian thing? Canadians are pretty 'right-on' people so I can't imagine Christians there getting worked up about what to call a national holiday that is shared by all. So I'm guessing it's an American thing, maybe an attempt to include everyone in a seasonal holiday. The only people who could object to that would be a few swivel-eyed Kinda Christians in the US population.
We see these extremists from time to time on TV and in the newspapers in the UK. Convinced there is about to be a take-over of Europe by Moslems. It's nonsense, of course. Scratch a Moslem and you'll find someone who wants a job, a safe place for them and their family to live, and a decent future for their kids. I sometimes come across anti-semites too, convinced that the world is being run by a Jewish conspiracy led by the Rothschild family. That's one of the oldest conspiracy theories of all time.
The truth is less exciting: we're more alike than we are different. And, given the state politics is in right now, maybe it's time to start emphasising what we share.
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