Sierran from Washington DC, Bob Morris, sends a true Christmas message…below
Happy Holidays to all!
Donna
Seasoned Gratings
By Bob Morris
Washington DC
Dec. 2006
Any time I have taken a November or December drive down into the Bible Belt
(which by the way has a serious lack of good alternative, rock or jazz radio
stations), I have been entertained by a seemingly continuous rant of various
on-air personalities and their call-in listeners centered on the need to
“put the Christ back into Christmas.” I spent much of my life in the retail
industry, and have been responsible for a lot of commercial advertising
about “Happy Holidays”, “Seasons Greetings” and even (shudder) “Xmas”, so I
feel at least a portion of the strong animosity to those secular themes is
aimed at me. Nonetheless I am not adverse to the lament of the angry
Christians, or at least I wouldn’t be if they were focused on the values
that we ascribe to Jesus in the record of his lifetime; promoting acts of
charity, peace, love and universal brotherhood. In fact, if Jesus were half
the man he is reported to have been and he took a look at us today and saw
people determinedly practicing Christly values during the season, I reckon
he’d be happy no matter what the day was called: Christmas, Xmas, Chanuka,
Kwanzaa, or (my favorite) Winter Solstice. In fact, he’d probably want us to
move on from being peaceful and loving just once a year and instead try to
do it on, say, Mondays or Wednesdays or at least on first Thursdays of the
month.
Unfortunately, the focus of the radio rants isn’t on so called “Christian
virtues”. (Hmmm, my computer program automatically capitalized “christian”.
I had no idea that there was a religious influence on Microsoft.) Instead
people all across the Southeast and into the Midwest are calling merely for
commercial and governmental expressions of the season to use the word
“Christmas” instead of the various non-religious prescriptions. Well, I
would like to suggest that we are in the midst of a more fundamental, at
least from an historical perspective, reductive trend regarding these winter
holidays. I think we can all agree that long before there was a Christmas,
there was Winter Solstice; celebration of the day when the trend goes from
less hours of light to more. Well, we are now in the process of taking the
“Winter” out of Winter Solstice! It was 76 degrees in Washington DC the week
before Christmas this year. The Alps don’t have any snow. All over the world
we are seeing the demise of winter and we need to do something about it. For
sure Jesus would be a big supporter of a world wide effort to put the winter
back into the Winter Solstice. After all, the wondrous balance of nature
that makes life possible on this planet is supposed to be the family
business, founded by his father. Surely they can’t be happy about us messing
up their work.
So we need to put our attention to a real down to earth problem, not some
semantic distraction about putting the Christ back into Christmas. If we
focus on putting the Winter back into Winter Solstice, getting away from our
greedy ethic of consumerism and consumption and moving to a culture of
thoughtful conservation and climate protection, I think we will find that it
will be a lot easier to incorporate universal brotherhood not only into the
end of December, but to Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Heck, then every
day can be Christmas!
--
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