Blogcoven

Through a sea of odd and unfamiliar nausea probably caused by sour milk in my coffee this morning, I seek out things that would ordinarily cause discomfort on their own. It can’t possibly get any worse. I was, unfortunately, right. Even the self-righteous irritants at the Backwater Report crowing about the culture of death failed to arouse more than a half-hearted thought of His statistics aren’t even consistent with themselves…. Then I read this and thought Ah, someone figured it out.

You don’t have to go read it; it’s mostly the sort of thing we hear a lot of around Christmas anyway, but this is the line that struck me as truer than most:

…most Americans do not recognize this commercialized, mean-spirited Christmas as their own.

I know what I consider “my own” Christmas. Interestingly (and hopefully unsurprisingly) enough, it has nothing to do with America and the over-marketed free-for-all I’m well used to seeing. The crowds at the mall, the decorated shops, and the wild promotional offers designed to draw even more money from a frenzied population are associated with November/December in the same sort of way I associate traffic with rush hour. Rush hour is happening because everyone is going home. That’s sort of the important part. The clogged freeways are an effect, and can be avoided if one desires.

The conservative backlash against the tendency to de-specify religion in solstice greetings is not new. There have been complaints about this every year; it’s just that the increasingly malicious culture wars have brought the debate into the spotlight this time. Yes, I sang modified words to standard Christmas carols in elementary school. (And yes, I thought they were dumb at the time.) Although we were not discouraged from wishing one another “Merry Christmas” (it was the Bible Belt, after all), decorations and art projects carefully said “Happy Holidays.”

I remember one particular point of rebellion in middle school when I, on the day before the winter break, greeted people with every seasonal greeting I could think of, one after another. I never really saw the point in being offended at being greeted with the wrong wish, though I admit it’s never been an issue in my life.

So although I thought it was silly at the time, I do line up with the dirty liberals once again in this debate. I don’t care what shops decide to do, but I do think schools should be kept religion-neutral. Bill O’Reilly probably wouldn’t appreciate being wished a Blessed Solstice.

All that is completely peripheral to Christmas, though. I don’t care a whit how the world decides to send me into Yuletide bliss; I know what it means to me and I’m happy with it. I will get there with or without the hullabaloo, and I will enjoy it regardless of efforts to ingrain “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire” in my head for another year. It mystifies me that people are putting their energy into this debate rather than trimming their own tree, educating their own children, partying with their own friends, and enjoying their own season.

But maybe I’m too ill at the moment to really get irritated.