I've been wishing everyone Merry Christmas and just generally refusing to recognize that the decorations at work are merely for "Happy Holidays". So far no one has lectured me on my cultural insensitivity, or even seemed to notice. I'm just glad no one has wished me Happy Channukakkah yet or I'd have to punch them in the face for disrespecting my people!
Get your Tim Geithner TAX CHEAT! stamps!
5 Comments
Leave a comment
The comment login system is acting strange. If you get an error message saying you aren't logged in when you are, just reload the comment page and try again. I'm trying to track this bug down, but it's not easy.
Happy Christmahannukwanzakah.
Even though I'm not exactly Christian, I think Christmas is cool, because it is a celebration of family and love. I'm used to Christian holidays being THE holidays, and I associate with them lots of fun memories and thoughts of loved ones. In Brazil, any holiday is just an excuse to do fun things with the people you love, to phone-call people you haven't talked to in a while, and to buy cool gifts. Even my atheist grandmother calls me on Easter to wish me a Happy Easter, for example, because we've spent so many fun Easters together, since I was like two years old. So even though I don't believe in the miracles described in the Bible, I don't mind Christmas or Easter or any of the other Christian holidays. I think they're great, and I like them for secular reasons - I don't seem them as Christian-only.
And if you say "But that just misses the point of what we're celebrating" (which is an understandable sentiment for a Christian to have about this), then remember that they were Pagan holidays to begin with (celebrating things like the solstice, the equinox, the cycles timed by the moon, and the helical rising of different stars, all of which indicated the beginning of longer days and farming-friendly weather), and that Christianity hijacked them and MADE them be about Christian things. It's not like the birth and death of Jesus even happened around those times of the year (probably). So I guess I'm doing my small part to steal these Holidays back to the naturalists...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter#Possible_pagan_influences_on_Easter_traditions
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter#Easter_as_a_Sumerian_festival
Because, if Wikipedia says it, it must be true... =]
(Ah, and I meant "Heliacal rising"... in the previous post).
Merry Christmas!
BNM
Our Cub Scout pack leader said something about it not being "X-Mas" but "Christmas", and afterwards I heard one of the parents giving him the old "but the X is Greek for Chi so it's really okay blah blah blah". I asked him if that meant that everyone who wrote "Merry X-Mas" was Greek or intentionally speaking Greek.
He just about blew a fuse. I thought he was kinda kidding but this apparently is a very important subject to the guy. A week later he was still going on about it at the pack Christmas party.
His logic was along the lines of...Heck, I've been trying to write it out and I've just realized that I *still* don't know what he was talking about...
Bernardo: Some Christian holidays were placed near older Pagan holidays, but that doesn't mean that "they were Pagan holidays to begin with". There are only so many days in a year, and even fewer that correspond to important astronomical phenomena. But yes, it's very unlikely that Jesus was born in the winter, seeing as how there was a census at the time and that would required lots of people to travel.