Beth Martin turned me on this this article that aptly summarizes the colossal hypocrisy of our society in terms of holiday celebration: Neutering Santa – Newsweek Society – MSNBC.com. Businesses, governments and schools are all jittery about celebrating anything remotely Christian; even concepts like Santa (the pinnacle of Christmas secularization) and holly are becoming taboo. The fascinating thing is that Christmas lies at the very heart of our trumped up “holiday season”; without it, December is just another month. But our society has so much invested in Christmas, in retail merchandising and television specials alone. And there is the unnamed emotional attachment to the holdays; even the most secular athiest feels some change in people around the end of the year.
But herein lies the problem–Christmas is a vestigal holiday left over from the days when freedom of religion meant free expression of your religion. Even unbelievers saw the Christmas celebration and wanted to bathe in some of it’s goodness. Now that secularism and inclusion rule the day, the battle is waged between the hearts of the common man and the minds of the “tolerant”. People want the celebration and goodwill without the essential reason for these things.
So Happy *****mas 2005–a case-study in progressive secularism. May nature favor you and yours and may the weak be trampled under foot and the strong prevail! Heil Darwin!
(PS: Remember when the sneaky secularist argued that X-mas really wasn’t about x-ing out Christ, it was just easier to write that way? I guess he’s given up the sneakiness.)
