↓ Archives ↓

Posts Tagged → Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas, America

Christmas is America’s national holiday. Regardless of your religion or level of religiosity, wishing your fellow Americans “Merry Christmas” is a big statement of unity and shared vision for our shared future together. It’s not a statement of theology. Rather it is a statement that we belong to and are committed to this Western nation with its own history, laws, freedoms, culture, and commonly held ideals. One of the ideals of this season, this time of year, is a universal peace, a sense of personal peacefulness. A communal peacefulness. Peace through kindness, charity, less judgmentalism and more forgiveness. Peace through a sense of satisfaction for having the simple things, for enjoying the simple things. For sharing in the simple things.

People who are shouting at children singing holiday songs, shouting at people who are putting up communal holiday trees, shouting at people who are attempting to enjoy this brief period of communal peacefulness, do not belong here. They have no inherent right to be here. The people who are disrupting holiday celebrations with demands of “look at me, me me” need to leave this place. They don’t fit here, America is not a good fit for them. There is no good reason why we should give up our little moment of annual peaceful respite out of the entire year for these selfish grinches. Who do they think they are? Who and what do they think we are?

I’ll be charitable and say that these people are frustrating.

It is best that we be honest with them and tell them “This American culture here is not your culture, we see it and that is OK, and so we understand that you need to go back to the place where your shouting and violence and mean spirited behavior is a good fit. We don’t want it here. We are happy with what we have here. We will be happier when you leave America and don’t come back.”

Whoever’s path you happen to cross, wish them Merry Christmas.

And that is my honest Merry Christmas message. I wish you and all of us peace and peacefulness. Hopefully we get snow, too, which really enhances the sense of being settled cozy inside, together.

Merry Christmas, America.

Merry X-Mas to all Americans

Today is Christmas, the national holiday of America and most Western nations. Its origin is easy enough to decipher from the English name we use today, which is a conjunction of two words, Christ and Mass, or Christ’s-Mass, Christ being the Anglicized version of the Greek Chrystos, which means anointed.

Why does any of this matter? Because people best do things they agree with and understand, and in order to understand a thing, a person must understand the entire thing, especially its genesis.

Holding a Christian Mass -or Christmas- in honor of the Jewish man Joshua the Nazirite (or Joshua of Nazareth) whom orthodox Christians believe fulfills anointed messianic prophecy as interpreted from the Hebrew Scriptures (TANACH, or Torah (The Old Testament), Nevi’im (the Prophets), and Ketuvim (the Writings), is a way of celebrating the person at the center of the Christian faith. At least as the faith has been understood after the First Nycean Council (held in Nyceae Greece, now Iznik Turkey, in the year CE 325), when the first 275 years of Christianity was then greatly reformed and shaped, and out of which a religious orthodoxy emerged that both Protestants and Catholics today follow.

Apparently observed mostly as an austere holiday devoid of  outward joy or expressions of happiness for most of its 1,500 year history, and conveniently set for the 25th day of December to match up with Hanuka’s 25th day of the Hebrew month of Kislev, Christmas as we now know it in America was created by a Briton, a 19th century writer named Charles Dickens.

Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, something almost all Americans are familiar with. Starring one Ebenezer Scrooge and Tiny Tim and a cast of other characters designed to tug at our heart strings and elicit our deepest sympathies and emotions, A Christmas Carol aggressively addresses what Dickens saw as a dearth of happiness and Christian charity. Especially at that time, when the modern industrial revolution had pulled people off the rural farms and pooled them into teeming urban slums, creating a huge strata of direly poor people in need of everything and unable to provide for themselves as they had back on the farms.

(note that Karl Marx wrote his Communist Manifesto at the same time in response to the same industrial revolution socioeconomic dynamics playing out in Germany and Europe, but instead of trying to encourage Christian faith to rise to the occasion, like Dickens, Marx sought to supplant Judaism and Christianity with his own new religion…)

Dickens believed that those who had benefited most from the industrial revolution and its cheap labor had a Christian duty to share their success in the form of charity with those living in the urban slums. And so Dickens’ A Christmas Carol story is both a huge guilt trip and emotional plea that was immediately and wildly successful when it debuted and continues to shape our own Christmas experiences to this day.

Combined with Scandinavian traditions of Santa Claus and reindeer, evergreen trees decorated with festive lights, and German gift giving, Dickens’ vision of a friendly, happy, merry, relaxed Christmas is how Americans celebrate, observe, or simply enjoy the holiday today.

So today is Christmas in America. Whether or not one is an orthodox Christian, an orthodox Jew, a Hindu, a Buddhist, or any other religious or nonreligious faith or identity, this day is yours to make of it what you will. Religious or secular. Even the secular version has the best of human traits.

Why not make the most and best of it? Wishing some stranger in the shopping center a Merry Christmas can have as much theological meaning as you want it to have, or it can simply be your best of heartfelt personal well wishes to a fellow American citizen. It is yours to choose what you mean by saying Merry Christmas, but the point is that saying it neither detracts from your own faith, nor does it add to anyone else’s faith if you simply wish them a Merry Christmas.

Some places like Dearborn, Michigan, and Borough Park, Brooklyn, have such an absence of Christians that it would not make sense to wish anyone one encounters there a Merry Christmas.

But to everyone else in America, I wish you a very Merry Christmas, with only the best of hopes for you today and in the year 2023 ahead.

Merry Christmas. So shoot me

Christmas time is the best time of the year in America.

Regardless of your religious affiliation or conviction, wishing fellow Americans a Merry Christmas is in the good spirit of cheer, fellowship, happiness, relaxation, making room for one another.

While “Christ’s mass” had an obvious religious basis, it was originally scheduled to track its parent religion. Christmas always falls on the 25th day of the last month in the Gregorian calendar, December, just as Chanukah always falls on the 25th day of the Hebrew month of Kislev. The two holidays therefore always fall near one another, and in America Chanukah (a commemoration of an improbable win for religious freedom against ethnic cleansing) has been strongly coopted to be more Christmas-like.

Over time in Western Europe, Christmas evolved to include gift giving, merrymaking, communal singing and declarations of faith, time with family. The befurred Scandinavian Saint Claus (Saint Klaus, or Nicholas, now Santa Claus) in his snowy winter environment became one of the defining symbols of the holiday.

Charles Dickens put the exclamation point on Christmas in the 1800s, through both strongly pointed opinion essays and his fiction stories arguing for a truly gentler, kinder, more forgiving time where the most important religious values would be brought to bear. And make the season happier, society more humane.

As an open society, America has come to embody the best, most inclusive aspects of this European legacy. It’s really remarkable, if you think about it, how inclusive America is, how open it is. To the point where Sikhs, Hindus, Jews, Mormons, Buddhists, and others can equally feel a part of Christmas time.

It’s true that Christmas has become captured by materialism, that it has become largely secularized, and much of its original religious message has been blurred. But what is wrong with making a major religious holiday welcome to so many others who do not necessarily share in its most religious aspects? What is wrong with seeing the very religious values of tenderness, kindness, gentleness, love and happiness be widespread among everyone?

Because of aggressive anti-religion atheists, somehow wishing fellow Americans Merry Christmas became verboten. Well, I just reject that.

Christmas is now a quintessential and quintessentially American holiday. America’s best qualities are on display at Christmas time. To try and shame people from wishing one another a Merry Christmas is itself shameful. If you don’t observe Christmas, fine. Just wave, smile, and enjoy the happy spirit in which the greeting was given. Nothing bad is meant by it.

It is the spirit of America.

Merry Christmas, my fellow Americans, Merry Christmas.

And peace on earth.