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!