December is here and the turkeys are getting nervous. The anorexic one in the corner is laughing its miniscule head off, and the gluttons among them are wishing they\u2019d not indulged in those food supplements quite so freely.<\/p>\n
If you accused me of fabricating those turkey thoughts, I\u2019d plead guilty. Of course they have no concept of the meaning of Christmas; but it seems they\u2019re not alone.<\/p>\n
As someone who\u2019s allergic to shopping at the best of times, I can sympathise a little with those nervous turkeys, although it\u2019ll only be half a day or so of my life I\u2019ll lose to the pressures of consumerism; the turkey\u2019s devotion to our Christmas Day feeding frenzy is a little more all-consuming than mine.
\nWhat follows could very easily become a rant, and I could be setting myself up for a lot of religious hate mail, but I\u2019ll try to keep it (relatively) light and entertaining.<\/p>\n
(Note: I have frequently put words like \u201cChristmas\u201d and \u201cChristian\u201d in quotation marks. This is done intentionally in order to show that I don\u2019t entirely believe the word to be appropriate.)<\/p>\n
Disclosure. I\u2019m a former churchgoer in the Anglican\/Lutheran Christian faith. Never devout, I lost faith for good when the pastor was asked to leave.<\/p>\n
I struggle with the season that people call \u201cChristmas\u201d. Santa\u2019s popularity ratings are orders of magnitude greater than the person who should be at the centre of Christians\u2019 Christmas. Christmas itself starts on December 25th in the Christian calendar. People of many denominations as well as people with no religious affiliation participate in \u201cChristmas\u201d. Yet attempts to adopt an inclusive, non-faith-specific name for the season that starts in November (or even October!) are met with resistance and hostility.<\/p>\n
Those who\u2019ve read my past articles will remember that I was raised in the dilapidated Victorian row housing just east of London. When I was born, pretty much everyone in my area was some flavour of white Anglo-Saxon protestant (there were Jews and Roman Catholics kids in my school: I know this because they didn\u2019t attend daily assembly), and Christian holidays were observed un-self-consciously. Most kids lumped Santa, sleighs, trees, tinsel, Jesus, the wise men, and Bing Crosby into the \u201cChristmas\u201d pigeonhole back then; for them \u201cChristmas\u201d was a word that encompassed everything that went on in the run-up to December 25th and beyond.<\/p>\n
Immigration from Britain\u2019s former colonies really started in earnest in the 1950s \u2013 initially from Africa and the West Indies, and then, in the 1960s, from the Indian sub-continent and elsewhere. The new Britons\u2019 presence started to change the \u201cfaithscape\u201d \u2013 high streets and nascent shopping areas were being frequented by Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and people of other faiths. What they thought of \u201cChristmas\u201d I never thought to ask, but I suspect that some, perhaps in an effort to integrate, were swept along by the gift-buying and Santa worshipping, just like their \u201cChristian\u201d neighbours.<\/p>\n
Mrs. H. and I married in 1979, and we moved nearer to the edge of the Greater London area; in the late 80\u2019s we moved further out, to a semi-rural bedroom community. Both these moves gained us a little more space, but in doing so diluted the multi-cultural mix in our neighbourhoods. We continued with the Christian-centric holiday happenings; however, this was the \u201ckid period\u201d in our lives, and we became increasingly conscious of the juggernaut that was commercialism \u2013 having kids will do that for you!<\/p>\n
We still called it \u201cChristmas\u201d.<\/p>\n
In 1994, we became immigrants ourselves when we moved to Canada. Commercialism had been growing in the UK, but hadn\u2019t prepared us for the sudden jump to North American levels \u2013 we were even introduced to \u201cChristmas in July\u201d, a tradition that goes back to the 1930s. I\u2019d experienced \u201cChristmas in September\u201d in a hardware store in England \u2013 Christmas music being played \u2013 but a manufactured, separate event that unashamedly cashes in on the commercialism surrounding the \u201cChristian\u201d celebration? People in the southern hemisphere are used to seeing Santa sweating it out in December (I hope that deodorant is part of Santa\u2019s toolkit there) \u2013 I guess \u201cChristmas in July\u201d gives us northern hemisphereans (or is it hemispherites? Surely not hemispheroids\u2026) a flavour of an antipodean \u201cChristmas\u201d. But that\u2019s not really the reason for \u201cChristmas in July\u201d, is it\u2026<\/p>\n
I think \u201cChristmas in July\u201d may have been a turning point for me, although I didn\u2019t realize it at the time. For several years after moving to Canada, I was still part of the school of thought that insisted that \u201cChristmas\u201d continue to be called Christmas \u2013 why should we give up our culture in order to appease those who have brought their own cultures and celebrations to Canada?
\nRecently though, I\u2019ve realized that people are confusing commercial \u201cChristmas\u201d with Christian Christmas.<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s what this article is really about.<\/p>\n
Rather than defend \u201cChristmas\u201d against the onslaught of \u201cpolitically correct\u201d multi-cultural attack, I\u2019m surprised that Christians aren\u2019t incensed by Christmas being subverted by rampant commercialism and consumerism. Christmas starts on December 25th (in the Eastern Orthodox faith, it starts on December 25th according to the Julian calendar \u2013 the rest of us use the Gregorian calendar). Christians should be demanding a different name for the commercial run-up to Christmas.<\/p>\n
Other faiths have their own celebrations at this time of year. Hindus and Sikhs have Diwali (Festival of Lights) in October or November; some Hindus in the USA now observe a new holiday called Pancha Ganapati from December 21st to 25th. The Jewish festival of Hanukkah is celebrated in December. Muslim holidays are set according to a twelve lunar month calendar rather than a solar calendar, and at present, their major holidays don\u2019t align with Christmas. Buddhists have Bodhi Day (Day of Enlightenment) on December 8th, and the Pagans have Yule. Many argue that the date for Christmas was set in order to usurp the Pagan traditions. Certainly, traditions such as the mistletoe and the yule log are borrowed from paganism. It might be that the twelve days of Christmas originates from the twelve days that the Celts believed the sun stood still for.<\/p>\n
Even Pastafarians have a holiday in December; they call it \u201cHoliday\u201d.<\/p>\n
In the secular world, there are many celebrations in the October to December period. They include Halloween (originally a Pagan\/Christian event), Guy Fawkes Day in the UK, and American Thanksgiving.<\/p>\n
In Canada, there are many ice- and snow-related festivals in January, February and March.<\/p>\n
And of course, there is the substantial secular consumerism that\u2019s attached itself limpet-like to Christmas.<\/p>\n
To me, as a former \u201cChristian\u201d, the foregoing all represents the tip of an iceberg of a compelling case for adopting a new name for winter celebrations. Any new name would need to be secular since it would encompass both secular celebrations and holidays of many faiths. Such a name would therefore be inclusive rather than exclusive. Most importantly, there need be no single name for it. For example, \u201cWinterfest\u201d might work well in the northern hemisphere, but \u201cSummerval\u201d might be a better appellation in the southern hemisphere.<\/p>\n
Perhaps someone with a better education than mine, or a wider vocabulary than mine could come up with alternative secular names.<\/p>\n
Imagine a seasonal celebration that the vast majority of people could support. They would be free to respect and sample each other\u2019s faith-based celebrations; they could shop for gifts unashamedly, and they wouldn\u2019t need to feel self-conscious about having coloured lights on their houses for three months of the year. Turkey-eating could be detached from a specific date, a course of action that would make life (and death) on a turkey farm less boom-and-bust. Just imagine.<\/p>\n
John Lennon would be proud.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
December is here and the turkeys are getting nervous. The anorexic one in the corner is laughing its miniscule head off, and the gluttons among them are wishing they\u2019d not indulged in those food supplements quite so freely. If you accused me of fabricating those turkey thoughts, I\u2019d plead guilty. Of course they have no concept of the meaning of… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[488],"tags":[667],"class_list":["post-166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bbs","tag-words"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=166"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1572,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166\/revisions\/1572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}