We need a little real Christmas spirit every day

December 23, 2006

Guest Post by Morbo

I try to be a reasonable guy when it comes to Christmas. If you want to celebrate the holiday, have at it. Deck your halls, go to church all day, drown in eggnog and charge up that credit card. I really don’t care.

Just don’t try to force everyone to celebrate with you — and don’t expect the government to pay the tab for your seasonal merriment or decorate every public space with your favorite holiday kitsch. Call off your Christmas police who insist that every store clerk use religiously correct farewells, and stop fretting over whether Old Navy is having a “Holiday Clearance” or a “Christmas Sale.” Trust me, Dec. 25 will come either way. Was that so hard?

Apparently so, as we are still receiving massive amounts of whining about an alleged “war on Christmas.” One of the more pathetic columns about this appeared recently in the New York Post, taking the form of a defense of Santa Claus.

Columnist Andrea Peyser quotes comedian Jackie Mason, who, although Jewish, has taken it upon himself to defend Christmas. Mason told Peyser:

“All the yentas and the lawyers and the ACLU and the maniacs decided that Christmas was a danger! We should thank God there’s a holiday that promotes love among people. Even lowlifes feel guilty for doing anything wrong during this season!”

You see, that’s part of the problem. First of all, true lowlifes don’t care that it’s Christmas. They break into people’s houses while they are away shopping and steal presents right out of cars. It happens every year.

More importantly, why would we accept decent behavior from people for one month out of 12? Christmastime has become an excuse for people to pick up cheap grace. Instead of expecting people to be decent, good and caring of their fellow humans all year round, we merely let them do a half-assed imitation of it for three weeks in December. It’s great that people feel moved to toss a toy in the Toys for Tots bin in December for the poor kids. But consider what happens to the poor kids the rest of the year: Let them eat fruit cake.

Yep, we feel all warm and fuzzy in December and write a check to the homeless shelter. A month later, many of its clients are still sleeping under bridges. It’s great that a Christmas train rambles through Appalachia with gifts for the poor kids. The fat man’s red suit blots out an uncomfortable question: Why does the richest nation on Earth accept that these people live in shacks, are malnourished and have no health care?

If Christmas really promoted peace and understanding among people, blowhards like Bill O’Reilly, John Gibson, William Donohue, Jerry Falwell, etc. wouldn’t think it was OK to call everyone who disagrees with them on government’s role in the holiday fascists. Nor would Religious Right groups find it acceptable to sell obnoxious buttons blaring, “I Celebrate CHRISTmas.”

Do suicide bombers and terrorists take the day off? Even if they did, I would still be troubled by the fact that they believe they can blow me to smithereens on Boxing Day.

Let’s face it: The display of “peace on earth, goodwill toward men” that many put on in December is all too often as thin as dollar-store wrapping paper. For too many people, Christmas is excuse to merely adopt a temporary stance of caring.

Santa encompasses the spirit of human kindness? Please. To poor kids, he is a cruel hoax who can’t deliver on his promises, no matter how good you’ve been. Affluent kids laugh at his threats, knowing that on Christmas Day Playstation XXVI will be under the tree no matter what.

To Andrea Peyser and Jackie Mason, such a morally bankrupt symbol may indeed epitomize human kindness. Perhaps he did that once, but these days I see Santa as little more than an ambassador for America’s credit card-driven consumer culture. I really wish the Christmas Police would stop rallying around such a figure and then lecturing the rest of us on the need for forced merriment and jolliness.

I really wish that Mo Do hadn’t gone for the cheap and easy pun for the title and at the end of this wouldbe fluff piece. But Trump’s observations about Bush (“the dumbest Presidnet in history”) and Iraq alone are worth posting this and save this from being another piece of Dowdian eye candy. Ah, if only Donald could say to the Decider, “You’re fired!

That’ll be about it until I make my own big Christmas post, which will be my most kick-ass one, yet, in my 2 years of blogging. Think, “It’s a Wonderful Life” starring George Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and other.

  • Stop! My head is throbbing! The stupid! Liberals have supposedly taken Christ out of Christmas, so they rally to defend Santa Claus? No matter what I try, I can’t get my mind around this nonsense. According to scripture, Santa did what, exactly? Pulled loaves and fishes out of his sack and passed them out to the good boys and girls? What was Judas’ reaction to reaction to receiving a lump of coal? Was Santa at the Last Supper, or did he sneak down the chimney late, and make off with the cookies?

  • Peace on earth and goodwill toward men are big ideas, too big for small people and their small gods. Shame.

  • What a lot of baloney. The Christmas celebrated in the Western world is merely a co-opted celebration of the winter solstice, the longest night and shortest day of the yearly cycle. Before the early Christian church claimed it for the birth of Jesus, people celebrated this time of year because from now on, there would be a little more daylight each day, offering hope through the savage winter for the growth and burgeoning life of spring, summer and for the plenty of the fall harvest. It was a celebration of life and survival.

    Those who buy (literally) into the Christian version of the Solstice celebration are welcome to it. It’s nice, but everyone knows it’s really all about presents, debt and the bottom line for the retail industry, at least in this country. Most churches in my part of the country don’t even have Christmas Day services, and fewer and fewer even bother with Christmas Eve. That’s how important it is to them.

    We spend a lot of time and hot air on this “Christ in Christmas” nonsense. I treasure the season for its small comforts, do my best to stay away from the scowling, pushy, unhappy crowds at the stores and enjoy the more homey things like hot soup, a crackling fire in the woodstove, and my friends and family. A warm cat curled up on my lap while I read a good book and the Stellar’s jay yelling outside in the trees is far more important to me than the gaseous flatulence erupting from that eejit O’Reilly’s pie-hole each year.

  • Beware of Christian capitalists! There’s great money in crying blasphamy over and over. Tell these soldiers of misfortune the war is over, and they need to shut-up! Christ upended the money tables in the temple, and who was offended? That’s right, Bill O’Reilly and friends! -Kevo

  • Santa Claus used to BE the war on Christmas.

    I guess I’m soft-hearted but I kinda like Christmas. A lot of people do access some good parts of themselves that they usually don’t. What the heck, with all the crazy crap us humans do Xmas doesn’t seem so bad. A little extra giving, a little extra smiliing. What do you mean I’ve had too much eggnogg?

  • The righties need to get some perspective on this holiday. Jesus was born poor and into a land occupied by the greatest and lone superpower on the planet at the time. He did many things in life under the waychful gaze of armed soldiers of the occupying forces. The occupying power was happy enough to put him to death due to his role in a sectarian religious rift that the occupiers ill understood. Since residents of occupied lands had limited, if any, rights under the occupiers, the occupiers felt it was perfectly acceptable to torture him a bit before executing him. The Romans didn’t care since, after all, this Jesus guy mocked the faith and gods of the occupiers and deserved whatever he got. Merry Christmas.

  • Wow, Morbo is on a roll today. Let’s review. Reporting honest science from a group that freely displays its interests is bad.

    And now he is the ying to Bill O’Reilly’s yang. Screw the charities that rely on December giving to support their good work for the rest of the year! Morbo is offended because Morb the giving is not sincere enough for Morbo…

    Uh, earth to Morbo, Christmas exists because it is a spectacularly popular holiday with vast numbers of people on earth. It is not a particularly important Christian holiday, that would be Easter. Christmas wasn’t even celibrated by Christians until the 3rd century. The holiday wasn’t going to go away, so Christians, like virtually every large organized religion, conveniently found a celebration to coincide with it.

    The constitution give the individual some amazing rights, and groups like the ACLU have done a tremendous service by defending them. But if tyrants and theocracies could not stamp out the holiday, an true democracy doesn’t have a prayer. So, go back in the cave with Max and plug your ears, because the Who’s are going to keep singing.

    Or perhaps you could re-read Dicken’s, who relates the value of ritualistic celbration of positive virtues to social justice in a series of short stories. If nothing else, a good read might take your mind off of Uncle Nasty staggering into your room as a child, wearing nothing but a Santa hat and the stench of cheap liquor (or whatever other formulative event seems to have made you such an intolerant Scrooge).

    -jjf

  • To the various yowling detractors who’ve gotten a burr up their blithering backsides over the course of this particular topic: If you want to behave like a herd of feral cats, then at least have the decency to lie down in the path of yonder approaching bus. I can promise you a killing strike that will be swift, and reasonably devoid of elongated pain….

    Suggesting that one should willingly concentrate on the few weeks of quasi-artificial goodwill that many of the mortal race of man attempt to flaunt upon their neighbors, whilst ignoring the other 49 weeks of ill will, fraud, greed, avarice, and cruelties not even demonstrated by, well—feral cats—is no less a conceptual fraud than to promote the few hours of electricity per day in “Beautiful Downtown Baghdad” as a bona fide example of mr. bush’s successful expedition into the Iraqi theater of operations, while simultaneously ignoring the other twenty one hours of the day within which there is no electricity.

    ***More importantly, why would we accept decent behavior from people for one month out of 12? Christmastime has become an excuse for people to pick up cheap grace. Instead of expecting people to be decent, good and caring of their fellow humans all year round, we merely let them do a half-assed imitation of it for three weeks in December. It’s great that people feel moved to toss a toy in the Toys for Tots bin in December for the poor kids. But consider what happens to the poor kids the rest of the year: Let them eat fruit cake.***

    What, pray tell, did Morbo say in this paragraph that you so diligently take offense over? Did the “cheap grace” phrase hit a nerve? Is it okay for a kid to be poor, live below the poverty line, have a diet that consists primarily of trans-fats (the foundational element found in all those deep-discount canned foods, by the way), and wear clothes that might otherwise be used to wipe the oil from a dipstick—all because the kid gets a single toy from the back of a deuce-and-a-half every December?

    ***Yep, we feel all warm and fuzzy in December and write a check to the homeless shelter. A month later, many of its clients are still sleeping under bridges. It’s great that a Christmas train rambles through Appalachia with gifts for the poor kids. The fat man’s red suit blots out an uncomfortable question: Why does the richest nation on Earth accept that these people live in shacks, are malnourished and have no health care?***

    Homelessness is a raw fact in this country. It ought not be—but it is. The disaster that is Appalachia is equally reprehensible—and equally avoidable, should this nation ever elect to get off its collective posterior and do something about it. The ballyhoo of the O’Reillys, Dobsons, and Falwells of this land is not the problem; rather, it is the symptom of the problem that manifests itself because far too many “americans” (note the lower-case “a” here) ignore the plight of America’s myriad “Tiny Tims” from December 26 until the Friday after Thanksgiving.

    And what about this “War on Christmas” crowd? The true meaning of Christmastide fell into the gutter of a theocratic Pottervile when the People of the United States allowed Falwell and his septic ilk to justify spending millions of dollars to hunt out and attack every living soul between the Atlantic and Pacific coastlines who didn’t buy their twisted message of “vangee hatred by daring to say “Happy Holidays.” Millions of dollars that could have provided the sorely-needed essentials of basic survival for those myriad Tiny Tims and their families. Billions of dollars spent on magnificent edifices of corporate worship dedicated to a mere book—a dead thing manufactured by man, no less, and the obscenely-rapacious profits garnered from its promotion—might otherwise have been invested in the mass replacement of those “Appalachian shanties” and “beneath-the-bridge bungalows” of cardboard and newspaper.

    Santa Claus, a cruel hoax? I dare say he is—when society puts Santa everywhere, but without the prerequisite ability to do that of which he ought to be capable. Santa becomes the Yuletide equivalent of mr. bush’s NCLB. All bones, no meat.

    If Morbo’s message is so painful to you, then understand that assaulting the messenger affords but a moment’s respite from the ugly truth that the message contains. Rather than attack the messenger—why not do something to alleviate the oft-times too painful truth that the message has dared to display before your gilded-cage mentality?

    For in the end, that cage, likewise, is made of nothing but bones….

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