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prog linked to a James Lileks rant about anti-Christmas sentiment. (Among other things. He gets a little scattershot and ad hominem in places.) The line I want to highlight is:"Whatever you believe matters less than if you believe [in G-d], and if you do, Christmas matters. If you believe very little, it may be the one day where you get all your believing done. Better than nothing."
Pause. This quote really does boggle my mind. Lileks is saying, "If you believe in G-d, Christmas is an important day to you." Let me just say that again: "As long as you believe in G-d, even a little, then Christmas is an important day."
And people wonder why I get so annoyed with the assumption that Christmas is part of the secular, universal culture.
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(no subject)
Date: 2002-12-21 12:27 pm (UTC)Yeah...
Date: 2002-12-22 07:01 am (UTC)Yes, Lileks is insane to assume that any theist believes in Christmas. But I'm going to generalize, because this kind of thing makes me angry and reckless. I think that a lot of conservatives don't get that they're supposed to put themselves in the shoes of others. I mean, it's not like the existence of Jews is some hidden fact. It's not like you can't figure out that regressive welfare policies will result in people starving. But there is this tendency for conservative thinkers to talk about how they're being oppressed by a moderate tax burden and having to acknowledge people who don't share all their beliefs. Okay, this is too fractured, but I'm posting it anyway.
Re: Yeah...
Date: 2002-12-22 12:22 pm (UTC)Culture, and culture.
Date: 2002-12-22 03:23 pm (UTC)My father was a staunch atheist: he didn't care for (or care about) nativity scenes, but he enjoyed Christmas music, trees, presents, and Santa displays -- enthusiastically hanging the Christmas lights, putting up the tree and shopping for presents each year. Why? Because he grew up with it and it was part of his culture. The religious aspects were nonsense to him, of course, but it felt good to do -- a piece of his childhood that he could share in turn with his own children.
And he was used to being proselytized. He simply ignored it, or responded with brutal honesty when he couldn't ignore it.
There is a mainstream American secular culture. It celebrates the Fourth of July with fireworks, Thanksgiving with turkey, Halloween with costumes and candy, Christmas with Santa and trees, and Easter with bunnies and eggs (just to rank them more or less from the most purely secular to the one with the largest number of religious overtones.) If you grow up participating fully in this culture, then chances are it's still what you do whether you follow the underlying religion or not.
I distinguish this from someone who is culturally Jewish, someone who -- chances are -- grew up celebrating the time around the winter solstice with a dreidel and menorah. You also, chances are, grew up with the normal attitude of a minority culture -- protective of your prerogatives and sensitive to insensitivity, which are the rights and inevitabilities of being in a minority; too-full participation in the rites of the mainstream risks losing the cultural identity that you are correctly proud of.
Perhaps. This might not apply to you at all; I don't know you well enough.
What I'm getting round to is this: it's not fully correct to call Christmas a religious holiday, but I find your offense reasonable anyway, because it's not only religious difference but cultural difference that separates you from Santa and the elves, Burl Ives singing Holly Jolly Christmas, and the most famous ghost story ever written.
Re: Culture, and culture.
yeah, but...
Date: 2002-12-22 08:10 pm (UTC)Now, I recognise that I'm in a minority culture, and that most Americans are Christian-descended. But it's a subtle difference between "the majority culture's holidays are ubiquitous and practiced by the majority, and are a major part of the culture" and "the majority culture's holidays are secular." It's not that Christmas is a religious holiday, solely, but that it's got religious overtones.
I don't mind that Christmas is a majority holiday. I don't mind that most people around me celebrate it. I mind that people keep pressuring me to celebrate with them: "But why don't you celebrate with tree/santa/Dec 25 presents/Yule carols? It's a secular holiday!" My denial of Christmas as a holiday for me to celebrate means, to some, that I'm insisting that the celebration of it turns people into believing Christians.
Other people can celebrate Christmas as athiests, as pagans, as secularists. But that does not put Christmas in the purely secular category of Independence Day, or even the secular-but-theist category of Thanksgiving. But my saying this should not threaten non-Christian Christmas celebrators into feeling accused of being closet Christians, and it bothers me that it does.
Re: Culture, and culture.
Date: 2002-12-23 07:30 am (UTC)"Christmas" is really three holidays combined; the names he gave to them were: "Santa Claus Day" (aka "Stuff Day"), "Saturnalia", and "The Nativity of Our Lord". "Santa Claus Day" is the holiday of exchanging gifts, occasionally extravagant, and it's pretty clear that a big part of this holiday is driven by commercial enterprise. (Something like the way that Valentine's Day is driven) "Saturnalia" is the holiday that spreads from mid-December through New Years and is a holiday mostly for adults and of going to parties. It's a holiday where you do stuff together. "The Nativity of Our Lord" lasts from the evening of the 24th through Jan. 6th (In the Gregorian calendar; orthodox calendars put it a bit later) and is the religious holiday.
Now this theory leaves out a few things - the traditional charity that is often associated with Christmas, for example. Dickens makes this the main focus of Christmas - there is no reference in "A Christmas Carol" to toys given to children, and the reference to church is confined to one sentence ("He went to church"). So there's room for improvement.
Incidentally, Jehovah's witnesses occasionally come visit our neighborhood handing out their reading material. On Saturday we were handed one titled something like "What Can You Learn From the Birth of Jesus Christ". One of the bits in there is that they are definitely /against/ celebrating Christmas; it goes as part of their general prohibition against celebrating birthdays. (they also seem to have a special objection to Christmas trees) The back page also makes a case for the star of Bethlehem being sent not by the Lord but by Satan.
Re: Culture, and culture.
Date: 2002-12-23 10:29 pm (UTC)Christmas as Christmas makes me a little uncomfortable, now. And White House Christmas Specials give me the willies. But perhaps I'm just strange.≥
(no subject)
Date: 2002-12-22 06:35 pm (UTC)As somebody who frequently gives donations to charity as gifts (not to "in lieu of" gifts, thank you very much) I'll say that some people find them an anti-gift-giving act.
(no subject)
Date: 2002-12-24 05:15 am (UTC)What we seem to have here is a ill-considered rant ripping apart a different ill-considered rant. A pox on both their houses, and let us be done with it.