Happy End of the World
I know people who don't understand holiday celebrations, especially the one called Kwanzaa.
Really, Kwanzaa isn’t about any one religion or any one God but rather about race and origin. I think of Kwanzaa as similar to Irish or Polish holiday traditions, reaching back for ancestral pedigrees which are all good. Strange how this Kwanzaa thing makes some people uncomfortable, though. It’s not un-American to celebrate your Irish roots but for some reason to celebrate your “Africaness” is considered off-key.
(I think it perfectly understandable and correct for you, say, to celebrate your heritage. Unfortunately for me, I would quickly get lost among all the national flags in my background.)
Kwanzaa is not really a new practice, is focused on end of year reminiscing and its symbology is easily traced. But back to Happy Holidays, if you do some checking up on modern Christmas traditions, you find that many of these “Birth of Christ” symbols predate Christ and originally had nothing to do with Christ at all. In the end, anyone who defiantly claims that the phrase “Merry Christmas” is really what we should say or what this time of year is all about is in many ways only buying into the Charlie Brown version. There are and have been many other versions out there.
The Christians that I meet get very animated about this made-up debate. I overheard one of my long-haired turkey hunter pals at the Tavern the other night say, “Hey, man, it’s ‘Merry Christmas!’ to me, goddammit, I don’t buy that ‘Happy Holidays’ bullshit!” He said it like he was looking for a fight, demanding that somebody tell him differently, which nobody was willing to do. The heated atmosphere was akin to an ancient Roman saying that Ceasar is divine or a Nazi brazenly playing the Master Race card, begging nonbelievers to stand up and take their punishment. But, if nothing else, I thought my pal to very trendy, and felt he must at least read the paper now and then between drunken binges.
I am more curious as to this “defiant” manner that Christians are now taking in this country, their demand to be heard and their insistence that we toe the line they have drawn, as if they haven’t had a voice in things or have been somehow suppressed over the last century. I see no evidence of their oppression but do feel the burn of their tyranny.
The Jehovah Witness ladies who come visit me all the time don’t celebrate Christmas and don’t seem to have that same kind of “in your face” attitude but they are truly convinced the world is about to end besides being driven by their own guidelines to get the word out on that. Instead of browbeating me with their beliefs, they sort of pity me for my ignorance, which seems appropriate, I suppose. In fact, I don’t know if they realize this, I haven’t openly accused them of it, but they sometimes seem to intimate that they believe our USA is the great evil that will bring the world down. (I think they vaguely want the great evil to be China, that would be easier for them to accept, but their descriptions don’t back it up, in my view). Certainly, though, they see the course of our country playing a role in the eventual global destruction that is coming and, in their view, coming soon. I wonder if secretly they don’t fear it is the traditional Christian that will lead/is leading us to that. And I wonder how far the traditional Christian is driven by a similar fear.
(As a side note, when I told the ladies most recently that I accepted the fact that the world was going to end they urged me to describe how I knew this. I explained that it had nothing to do with the follies of mankind, that our sun only has so much energy and will someday, a few million years from now, dry up and implode making life on this earth impossible. This I accept as fact. They then mildly suggested that perhaps God would miraculously intervene if we just played our cards right. Now, I know I am occasionally prone to injecting fancy where the facts may fail me, but I ain’t that desperate.)
Thus, I wonder if the antics of all modern people of faith aren’t driven by some unreasonable fear or their dogmatic inability to come to grips with the things people naturally face all the time. The fact that Christians in particular have been battling for the last quarter century to “take back” political power in this country, engaging in heavy handed social control which in my view is diametrically opposed to their own “meek will inherit” teachings, indicating that there are not satisfied just leaving it to God’s Will anymore, suggests to me that their most basic accepted beliefs are once again incongruent with reality or somehow making them incapable of adapting to modern life. Like the Pope or the King of England, one would think that this new Religious Empire we are watching emerge will eventually force a new “reformation” somewhere down the line.
It’s all very curious.
Meanwhile, my own views on what a God is or isn’t have changed dramatically over the last few years of observation and contemplation. Thus, when it comes to celebration, I celebrate different things in different ways.
But that’s probably best left for a face to face, no?
Really, Kwanzaa isn’t about any one religion or any one God but rather about race and origin. I think of Kwanzaa as similar to Irish or Polish holiday traditions, reaching back for ancestral pedigrees which are all good. Strange how this Kwanzaa thing makes some people uncomfortable, though. It’s not un-American to celebrate your Irish roots but for some reason to celebrate your “Africaness” is considered off-key.
(I think it perfectly understandable and correct for you, say, to celebrate your heritage. Unfortunately for me, I would quickly get lost among all the national flags in my background.)
Kwanzaa is not really a new practice, is focused on end of year reminiscing and its symbology is easily traced. But back to Happy Holidays, if you do some checking up on modern Christmas traditions, you find that many of these “Birth of Christ” symbols predate Christ and originally had nothing to do with Christ at all. In the end, anyone who defiantly claims that the phrase “Merry Christmas” is really what we should say or what this time of year is all about is in many ways only buying into the Charlie Brown version. There are and have been many other versions out there.
The Christians that I meet get very animated about this made-up debate. I overheard one of my long-haired turkey hunter pals at the Tavern the other night say, “Hey, man, it’s ‘Merry Christmas!’ to me, goddammit, I don’t buy that ‘Happy Holidays’ bullshit!” He said it like he was looking for a fight, demanding that somebody tell him differently, which nobody was willing to do. The heated atmosphere was akin to an ancient Roman saying that Ceasar is divine or a Nazi brazenly playing the Master Race card, begging nonbelievers to stand up and take their punishment. But, if nothing else, I thought my pal to very trendy, and felt he must at least read the paper now and then between drunken binges.
I am more curious as to this “defiant” manner that Christians are now taking in this country, their demand to be heard and their insistence that we toe the line they have drawn, as if they haven’t had a voice in things or have been somehow suppressed over the last century. I see no evidence of their oppression but do feel the burn of their tyranny.
The Jehovah Witness ladies who come visit me all the time don’t celebrate Christmas and don’t seem to have that same kind of “in your face” attitude but they are truly convinced the world is about to end besides being driven by their own guidelines to get the word out on that. Instead of browbeating me with their beliefs, they sort of pity me for my ignorance, which seems appropriate, I suppose. In fact, I don’t know if they realize this, I haven’t openly accused them of it, but they sometimes seem to intimate that they believe our USA is the great evil that will bring the world down. (I think they vaguely want the great evil to be China, that would be easier for them to accept, but their descriptions don’t back it up, in my view). Certainly, though, they see the course of our country playing a role in the eventual global destruction that is coming and, in their view, coming soon. I wonder if secretly they don’t fear it is the traditional Christian that will lead/is leading us to that. And I wonder how far the traditional Christian is driven by a similar fear.
(As a side note, when I told the ladies most recently that I accepted the fact that the world was going to end they urged me to describe how I knew this. I explained that it had nothing to do with the follies of mankind, that our sun only has so much energy and will someday, a few million years from now, dry up and implode making life on this earth impossible. This I accept as fact. They then mildly suggested that perhaps God would miraculously intervene if we just played our cards right. Now, I know I am occasionally prone to injecting fancy where the facts may fail me, but I ain’t that desperate.)
Thus, I wonder if the antics of all modern people of faith aren’t driven by some unreasonable fear or their dogmatic inability to come to grips with the things people naturally face all the time. The fact that Christians in particular have been battling for the last quarter century to “take back” political power in this country, engaging in heavy handed social control which in my view is diametrically opposed to their own “meek will inherit” teachings, indicating that there are not satisfied just leaving it to God’s Will anymore, suggests to me that their most basic accepted beliefs are once again incongruent with reality or somehow making them incapable of adapting to modern life. Like the Pope or the King of England, one would think that this new Religious Empire we are watching emerge will eventually force a new “reformation” somewhere down the line.
It’s all very curious.
Meanwhile, my own views on what a God is or isn’t have changed dramatically over the last few years of observation and contemplation. Thus, when it comes to celebration, I celebrate different things in different ways.
But that’s probably best left for a face to face, no?
posted by M.E. Bamboo at
3:04 PM
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