unrepentance

[kodalai]

I'm afraid I'm going to have to fill my allowance of cultural/religious/ethnic insensitivity right here, because I have no intention of toning down my Christmas spirit. ^^; Maybe I'm biased because as a child, my Jewish best friend would come over and help us decorate the trees and the house, but I simply fail to see how me celebrating my holiday is going to make your holiday enjoyment any less. Yes, I'm going to say "Merry Christmas" in the hallway and not "Happy Holidays" whether I know your religion or not, and I will expect you to take it in the spirit that it was meant: I hope you have a good break and enjoy your time with your family and have a lot of fun at your requisite Take Time Off, Decorate With Shiny Things, Get Presents, Eat Good Food holiday of choice.

Comments

[kracken.livejournal.com]

I feel the same way. I get annoyed when people mention a holiday and then follow that up with an apoligy. What's to apoligize for? I've even seen people apologizing in fics for mentioning religion. I think everyone's getting too PC. I'm not a real religious person, but I celibrate Christmas, so Merry Christmas. ^_^

[kodalai.livejournal.com]

It's not that I can't see how aggravating and even demeaning it could feel to someone to see such a huge industry and ethos built on something that excludes them -- I feel the same way every time I see, for instance, car commercials. I can sympathize with how frustrating it could be to have your own culture and traditions so thoroughly marginalized and ignored. But it's not a problem that can be solved by making myself guilty and miserable, so why should I?

[darksea.livejournal.com]

And it's not like you're rubbing their face in it, or trying to convert them either. Christmas these days so rarely has anything to do with Christ's Mass - if you were wishing them a merry one of those, I can understand their being offended, but it's not really about that, is it? It's about "Take Time Off, Decorate With Shiny Things, Get Presents, Eat Good Food," not the biblical birth of a historical personage who may or may not be important depending on your religion and beliefs.

Besides, 'Happy Holidays' sounds so... wimpy.

... more of the same, yeah? Not exactly the best contribution, but my support and added wishes for a merry Christmas.

[kodalai.livejournal.com]

This was mostly in response to the passage in the Call to Action report that recently came to light; there was one in particular where someone was complaining that Pomona was a stifling Christian institution, since it forces people to observe Christmas and Easter and ignores all other religious holidays... Correct me if I'm wrong, but does Spring Break even fall on Easter week most of the time?

[nekojita.livejournal.com]

Sounds perfectly fine w/ me!! As a pagan, I'm not bothered in the least about the holiday. Well, there was that one USA Today article that had some twit insisting that red and green lights signified Jesus and that everyone was putting them up as a sign of how 'morals' had returned to the country - not that some people just like pretty colors - but that's about it.

[kodalai.livejournal.com]

ome twit insisting that red and green lights signified Jesus and that everyone was putting them up as a sign of how 'morals' had returned to the country

...I can't quite figure that one out, since people have been putting up red and green lights at about the same rate as every other color of light for decades, right through the period this guy would consider immoral.

[nekojita.livejournal.com]

No clue myself, though I did want to ask the guy what the blue lights symbolized. Might be funny to see his answer.

[oysterverse.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I had a similar conversation with the parents last night--my argument boiled down to something like "if your holiday is not actually that significant within your own religion, it is frankly insulting for you to insist that I treat it as equal to the most important holiday in my religious and cultural tradition." Celebrate your holidays however you see fit, by all means. But don't diss me for celebrating my holiday how I see fit.

my Jewish best friend would come over and help us decorate the trees and the house

Of course, this would be the same Jewish friend who kept wandering into the kitchen one time when I was breaking down a large ham, and stealing pieces of it.

[foxglove6.livejournal.com]

No, I'm not kosher. I now celebrate Christmas. I forgot when Channukah started. But come on, Christmas is just a cooler holiday. There's a freaking tree inside your house! There are stockings! There's lots of food. There's a big red guy coming down your chimney. Channukah was never like that when I was growing up. Not the same excitement the night before or the joy the morning of. Channukah didn't acutally give presents originally. The jewish kids just got jealous. I mean, I know I did.
I agree that everything is too PC now. As a British comedian once said, "You guys have just ruined all the good jokes."

[oysterverse.livejournal.com]

Yep, Channukah is Christmas Lite, at least around here. Coooooooome to the dark siiiiiiiiiide. You knooooooow you want to. You can be a Unitarian Jew! Lots of people do it! We'll even have Seder dinners over Passover! Mwah hah hah hah hah.

[okaasan59.livejournal.com]

*snickering* Does this count as a perverse sort of proselytizing?

I like seder except for the lamb. The last lamb I had at a Seder meal was nasty. :P

lamb??

[foxglove6.livejournal.com]

Lamb at seder??? Uhm, if you're talking about the shank bone, which you probably are, you're not supposed to eat it, it's just symbolic. I don't even think lamb is kosher.... i don't know.

Re: lamb??

[okaasan59.livejournal.com]

I don't really know what you're supposed to have. I've only been to two Seder meals. One was at the home of a Jewish family and they said right out that they weren't serving all the traditional stuff. (I think they had roast beef or something.) The one I went to last year was at my church (Lutheran) and the pastor and his wife planned it and cooked the food. They also served this stuff that was made from chopped nuts with apples and honey. That was yummy.

[kodalai.livejournal.com]

Christmas has become a ridiculously huge cultural industry in this country, despite (or perhaps because) there's nothing particularly Christian about it any more. I would hate to think that other religions whose holy days are more grounded in spirituality would feel the need for their holiday to become as terribly overinflated as Christmas in order to celebrate them properly.

[arks.livejournal.com]

I used to use 'Spiffy Solstice' just to throw people off. Don't know why I ever stopped.

[kodalai.livejournal.com]

I think I would take that in the spirit in which it was intended. At the very least the use of "spiffy" should be worth mad points.

[(Anonymous)]

To run through the history one more time: Christmas was not an original or inherent holiday for Christianity (as Easter was): for the first couple of centuries, the Christian clergy tried hard to prohibit their flock from celebrating December 25, because it marked the birth of Mithra (the Savior in a competing mystery religion) -- eventually they gave up & declared it was actually Christ's birthday (though that conflicted with the Gospel accounts of the birth, which only two of four Gospel writers cared enough to describe in the first placel) & wiped out any mention of Mithraism (a similar process changed the date of weekly worship from the Sabbath to Sunday). When the Protestants in the 16th century started the practice of Bible reading again, many were horrified that things like Christmas had nothing to do with the Christianity of the New Testament -- which is why Massachusetts Puritans banned the celebration of Christmas all through the 17th century (and tried to substitute their own holiday, Thanksgiving, in its place).

Only two things seem to remain true over the millennia: (1) conservative preachers will be heard to denounce the culture for having in this generation secularized / paganized this Holiest of Holidays; (2) their congregants will continue to celebrate it in decidedly unChristian ways anyway (as they always have)!

So, Merry Mithramas (not to mention Salubrious Saturnalia and all its predecessors)!

GWB

[thefeifei.livejournal.com]

Sou deshou, ne! Even if "Happy Holidays" sounds wimpy, I say it because it conveniently wraps up Xmas and New Year's for the people I won't be seeing for either holiday. And ditto to Christmas being such a commercial thing. Mayhaps for those to celebrate it for more than what it's worth now, it can be Christmas, and for obliging shoppers it can be Xmas. X3