Bill O’Reilly and the rest of the wingnuts have started up the annual “there’s a Liberal WAR AGAINST CHRISTMAS!!!!” thing again.
Especially amusing is their view that Seattle-Tacoma International Airport’s decision to go ahead and put Christmas trees back up (after they had taken them down due to threats of a lawsuit from a Rabbi who wanted Menoras up as well) is somehow a great victory in this “war.”
Anyway, I figured that I’d put together this gleeful little holiday reminder, from a pagan:
The whole tree controversy sparked a discussion that’s still going on among my mom friends, driving home once again just how completely and totally different my world is compared to much of the rest of the country. All of my IRL friends who celebrate Christmas do so as a secular holiday, like Independence Day or Thanksgiving. We put up Christmas trees but you’ll find our homes lacking in nativity scenes, angels blowing horns, crosses and all the religious iconography. Santas, candy canes, snowmen and trees instead. Every secular person I know who celebrates Christmas does so without belief in or intent to promote Christianity… yet we are reminded by our friends of other faiths that to them a Christmas tree is just another part of the religious onslaught of Christmas from the Christian faithful. From the outside, there’s no distinction (while I know that the secular celebrants consider the distinction fairly important).
One of my Jewish mom friends in Ohio described to me how people literally recoiled in horror when her kids responded to the incessant questions about how they were going to celebrate Christmas that they DIDN’T. The very idea that anyone in this day and age is so ignorant or closed-minded to be horrified to know someone who practices one of the world’s major religions is so foreign to me and so completely unlikely to happen in my circle, I can barely get my head around it. The actual, practicing, go-to-church-regularly Christians I physically know and interact with are overwhelmingly of the liberal, Unitarian variety even the few more conservative Christians I know are educated, rational people who wouldn’t be caught dead recoiling in horror from Jewish children. Far outnumbering the Christians I know are the atheists, pagans, and secular Jews (and let’s not even get into the Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs who surround me in my neighborhood).
It’s a big ol’ world out there, folks. Wake the hell up and get over it.
*steals*
Let’s keep Saturn in Saturnalia. Sheesh.
Heck, weer in ur calendarz, providin ur holidayz…
(While we’re at it, weer in ur religion providin ur fundamental organisation and dogma, if you include Romans as pagans, and when you come to the influence of druids on Northern European christianity…)
8 more slacking days to solstice