And a Very Merry Christmas to You

It may seem uncharitable during this Christmas season to write an essay that is basically a rant, but I cannot help it. I went to the store to buy a traditional Christmas card—not a box of cards, but just one card, a special Christmas card—to hold some movie passes we bought as a gift for our babysitter. Our babysitter, like us, is Catholic. Or, shall we say, we are all practicing Catholics, as it seems that in this modern world, there is a not-so-small distinction between practicing and non-practicing Catholics.

And in this store, which shall remain unnamed, I could not find a single card that was remotely reminiscent of, well, Christmas. The card section was overflowing with Santas, snowmen, reindeer, trees, ornaments, stockings, snowy villages, wrapped gifts, and so on. Now, I do not want to be too presumptuous here, but doesn’t Christmas have something to do with a very special baby being born in a manger in Bethlehem?  You would never know from the card selection.

To make matters worse, the Christmas card section had a separate heading for “religious” cards. I understand when there are separate “religious” headings for birthdays, mother’s day, or even weddings, but putting up a separate heading of “religious” for Christmas is incredibly irritating, as though Christmas is first a secular holiday, and only incidentally related to religion. After all, the day is named after Christ, in case anybody cared to notice. I mean, how come the Hanukkah cards did not have a separate “religious” section? This, to me, is like having a “religious” section for baptism cards.

But even in the religious section, I could not find a suitable card. One had a gilded angel, but the only one that showed a manger scene was a sort of cartoon depiction of the blessed event. Now, a child’s drawing of the Nativity may be cute and dear if it is drawn by one of your own children or by a young niece or nephew, but a printed, mass-produced, happy-face line-drawing card is distinctly lacking in the sort of reverence and solemnity I had been hoping to convey as a proper commemoration of the day.

I am now thoroughly sick of the blatant effort of “progressive” malcontents to suck any vestige of Christ out of Christmas whenever it may appear in any public forum, even in a shopping mall. Apparently, only a fragment of these frantic, harried shoppers scrambling to conquer their gifts lists believes that Jesus Christ is the son of God.  But after all, the fact that we—those of us who are Christian—share gifts is specifically to emulate those Three Wise Men who gave gifts to the holy child. Since this is where the Christmas gift-giving tradition originated, it seems remarkably peevish to nevertheless celebrate the day with friends and family, yet simultaneously resent Christmas’ religious significance.

Nothing seems to escape. Christmas music is also being sanitized with more and more “seasonal” songs. I enjoy a good old croon as much as anybody, but apparently it is becoming taboo to play traditional carols that mention Jesus, Mary, angels, or God. We are getting plenty of Bing’s White Christmas and Dino’s Winter Wonderland, and, I shudder, a selection of today’s hip young wailers destroying some modern classic with grating vocal gymnastics. But for the most part, gone are any carols with references to that first Christmas, it seems, except for instrumental versions. Heaven forbid—excuse me, earth forbid—that Christians should be allowed to acknowledge just what we are celebrating.

And that’s dreadful. Because here in our home, we are trying to raise our children to view Christmas in the proper light. Of course it is a time that they receive presents, but it is also a time to give presents, to remember what those presents signify, to spend time with those we love and to show our love not only by giving gifts to friends and family, but giving also to those who are less fortunate whom we don’t know. But it is difficult to convey even this small lesson to our children, when so many people they see are simply engaged in a frenzy of ill-tempered consumption. It is galling, to say the least, to have a day that we regard as spiritually meaningful secularized to the point, not of meaninglessness, but worse: of meaning something that is the opposite of what it ought to mean.

I certainly do not want to imply that everyone must celebrate Christmas as we do. Rather, all those of other faiths, agnostics, or atheists should simply and respectfully allow those of us who do believe to celebrate the birth of the Christ child consistent with our time-honored traditions.  I suppose I have no strong objections, in the abstract, to anyone who wants to celebrate Christmas in their own way.  But I do not understand why Christians must therefore be forced to forsake any mention of Christ when that is the whole point of  our holiday. It seems rather ridiculous for non-Christians to get so exercised about it by militantly insisting upon a holiday filled only with cartoon Santas, inane music, and generic “holiday” greetings.

Atheists could hold their own holiday, which I would most happily ignore out of respect for their beliefs. They could celebrate Darwin’s birthday, for example, by sending each other cards with pictures of chimps and singing about the wonders of stepping forth from a blob of primordial slime. But it is the height of irony, isn’t it, that those who would denigrate Christianity bring more attention to Christmas day, and, not incidentally, to themselves, by their boorish anti-religious behavior and even more boorish insistence on the importance of Christmas by their unceasing efforts to secularize it completely. Rather like mohawked, tattooed, and pierced “non-conformists”, if they weren’t so antagonistically obsessed with what conformity IS, they might realize how silly and foolish they looked.

So I say to all of you out there who joyously celebrate the birth of Jesus in the best Christmas tradition:  I share your joy on this special day.  And I wish to everyone in the world–yes, everyone–a very Merry Christmas.

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