—-My republished (and lightly amended perspective on the holidays)—-

happy hollydays? you may sound queer when you say it, but that extra little ‘L’ changes everything: igniting religious resentment and making the beautiful, magical season that is just unfurling available to all (we all know the holly tree IS the iconic seasonal trimming, after all). jesus wasn’t red and green… to the best of my knowledge. 

here’s my real point… that i do love christmas, but i don’t believe in the original meaning of it anymore. do i see this as an issue? of course not. i see christmas going the way of st. patrick’s day, valentine’s day, and even halloween.  after all, can you tell me who st. patrick or valentine were? i don’t even feel like opening wikipedia.  all i need to know is that i can drink in the streets for one and am driven to drink in the streets for the other. and as for halloween - it was originally the celtic pagans acknowledging the day when the physical and spiritual worlds were believed to cross each other. then in the 8th century, the catholics thought that seemed fun, so they moved their all saints day from springtime to november 1st to join the party. they had easter to cover the vernal equinox, but hadn’t yet cornered the autumnal market.  and yet, nearly EVERYONE (save the mormons and jehovah’s witnesses) celebrates halloween, not just catholics and the now-departed celtics. the same goes for mardi gras: i’m not convinced that the pope is thrilled (officially, at least) with the creole-american, homo-excessive  interpretation. 

more than that, we use antiquated spirituality daily in our lives. the names of our days are pagan and norse, our months are greek and our planets are roman. we can call the middle day of the week wednesday without ever having to believe in Odin (after whom the day is named) because we’ve “outgrown” such obviously infeasible mythology. so why not outgrow the relatively little bit of it that’s left? 

christmas, through wonderful gift-giving, is an economic stimulus. or conversely, a time to feel inadequate and lonely when the supposed generosity of the season doesn’t quite reach you.  it also gives us an excuse to spangle our trees and homes with beautiful lights and items that are entrancingly shiny (and regrettably our yards with inflatable, larger-than-life snowmen and snowglobes). even if the story of jesus’ birth were to be lost from popular knowledge, the idea of giving and love (and shiny and blinking) will remain… and because of modern advents like wikipedia, future lollygaggers will no doubt be able to unearth the origin of christmas should the question arise. (at which time, they’ll read that yule, the winter solstice was just so curiously celebrated around the same time of year, and for more millennia than Genesis claims that the earth has existed). 

but i digress.  just as no one frets over the use of ‘halloween’ or ‘valentine’ in their company advertising, ‘christmas’ too shall no longer be a delicate subject of cultural exclusion, but a delicious secular extravaganza. 

after all, jesus’s birth had nothing to do with the winter, fir trees, or toy soldiers; the jews were just clever in turning chanukah into a gift-giving holiday loosely within the same calendar month; the muslims, well, do their own miserable thing; and the africans not-so-cleverly dreamt up a pan-continental hollyday where one sequentially lights christmas-colored candles in a suspiciously chanukah-like fashion.

just because you make something up, doesn’t mean it deserves reverence, but it can almost always be taken completely out of context and used as a superb excuse for a party or marketing campaign.  so light your trees, blast your johnny mathis, spin your little top, fast, or do something african…. that is, as long as you aren’t an institution of the united states government.  happy hollydays!

vegfoodandhealth:

Article from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that was presented at the symposium, “Fifth International Congress on Vegetarian Nutrition,” held in Loma Linda, CA, March 4–6, 200.