Tag Archives: Christian celebrations

Holiday Mash-Up

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Quick quiz: What do Jesus and the poop emoji have in common? They both are associated with Easter, silly!

Don’t believe me? Just go to the Easter display in your local store. There you can find cross-shaped tins of candy with the saying “Jesus Saves” and the offer “Jesus Jelly Bean Prayer Inside.” Then there’s the ever-so-seasonal pastel plastic poop emoji that, well, poops candy. (It also has whimsical bunny ears. As you can see.)

Now I don’t mind the mash-up of Christian Easter with its pagan roots. That practice has been around long enough to make it into a tradition. The pagan symbols of Easter are relatively easily adapted from their earlier symbolism of fertility and renewal to their Christian identification with resurrection. New life, and all of that. Eggs. Lambs. Chicks. Even bunnies, that most suggestive of symbols for burgeoning life.

But lately, there’s something … odd about the merchandise that’s offered for consumption on Easter. It’s not just that the pagan roots are showing. It’s more like Easter is getting confused with Christmas. Or maybe Halloween. Easter is getting to be yet another occasion for retailers to make a buck in the name of wretched excess. 

Look at the Easter displays in your local supermarket or department store. You’ll find baskets, all right, but many of them look more like trick-or-treat pails than things a seasonal rabbit would deliver. Now you can find them shaped like a Troll head or Mickey Mouse, and adorned with Guardians of the Galaxy, Batman, Despicable Me Minions, Spiderman, and other characters more often associated with Halloween costumes. There are even felt “baskets” adorned with pictures of dinosaurs and volcanos.

(Dinosaurs have theological implications, of course, as reminders of evolution. When pressed, some Christians will claim that dinosaur bones were put into rocks by Satan, to test the belief of the faithful. But I digress.)

Obviously, these assorted characters are meant to appeal to media-obsessed kids, and so are the trinkets the Easter baskets are loaded with. Barbies. Water guns. Chocolate soccer eggs. Posters and stickers and PJ Masks toys. Any gimcrack fancy that can pull in a few bucks, whether or not it’s related to Jesus or Oestre.

When did superhero, sports, and other fashionable toys become symbols of Easter? Back in the day, we got plush rabbits. Of course, we also had a limited choice of sweets – jelly beans, gum drops, and chocolate bunnies (which occasioned the eternal question of whether to bite off the ears or the tail first). Christmas candy consisted largely of candy canes and “books” of Life-Savers. Halloween candy was much more varied. 

Halloween has already surrendered its place as a Christian celebration (the eve of All Saints’ Day) to being a childhood ritual of door-to-door sugar-laden extortion. Sugar skulls for Día de Los Muertos may be gaining on fun-size Snickers.

Now both the commercialism of Christmas and the pop culture iconography of Halloween have made their way into children’s Easter baskets. The hell of it (sorry not sorry) is that it’s most likely too late to turn back now.

Mash-ups of Christian and pagan holidays are par for the course. We get the Druidic Christmas trees and the Coke-ified Santa (originally a Christian Saint Nicholas) and the exchange of gifts on Saturnalia melded with of the celebration of a quiet birth.

I’m not saying that cultural mash-ups aren’t fun or happy or festive. I’m just saying it’s all gotten a little out of hand. We now have the ubiquitous image of Santa kneeling at the manger. How long until we have Mickey Mouse rolling away the stone?

 

Off-Duty Santa

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My husband looks a lot like Jerry Garcia, at least in his “Touch of Grey” phase. Someone once said that if he were darker, he would look like Frederick Douglass. But most of the time, he gets mistaken for Santa Claus – even if it’s summer and he’s wearing his tie-dye shirt. Kids these days don’t know from Jerry Garcia.

Even without the red suit, Dan is perfectly Claus-esque. He has the white hair and beard, the red cheeks, the girth. I won’t compare it to a bowl of jelly, but it would shake when he laughs if he weren’t holding in his stomach.

Children recognize him everywhere he goes and react accordingly. Just yesterday we were sitting in a doctor’s waiting room and were facing the glass-paneled door to the hallway. Suddenly a little boy’s face with saucer-sized eyes appeared in one of the panes. He darted away and came back with his older brother. While they were staring and ducking, a younger sister appeared. Brave and uninhibited, she waved and blew kisses and tried to work the latch that opened the door. She banged on the glass panel and waved for all she was worth, while her brothers were content to play peek-and-hide. Everyone in the waiting room was enchanted, including us.

However, with great power comes great responsibility and Dan always uses his Santa powers for good. Once at a highway rest stop, he saw – and heard – a toddler screaming incessantly at the top of his small but surprisingly energetic lungs. He walked over to the child and said, “If you don’t calm down, I’ll have to put you on the naughty list.” The screaming stopped immediately and the mother silently mouthed “Thank you.” A job well done.

Although when it first happened Dan was annoyed, he has since become used to and often enjoys his year-round Christmas magic. Upon meeting two young boys in a restaurant (their mother asked permission first) the kids came up to him to verify that he was, indeed, Mr. Claus, who was apparently slumming at a diner during his off hours.

The boys asserted that they had been very good all year. Dan turned a stern if twinkling eye on them. “You could be a bit nicer to your little brother,” he told the elder. “And you could try a little harder in school,” he advised the younger. “We will, Santa! We will,” they promised. “Okay,” he said. “Now both of you do what your mother says!” as he strolled out of sight.

Being a random Santa actually suits Dan better than being a professional Santa. I understand that the gig pays well, but you can’t get one at a large store or mall without the proper credentials. Those red velvet suits are expensive. And so is professional Santa school, if you can find one in your area. Besides, all the fun might be taken out of it if it were a regular though seasonal job. There would be tragic kids – bring my father back, make my mother well. Dan’s an old softie, but there isn’t much to say to that. And there’d still be the everyday difficulties of dealing with terrified children, peeing children, and children who ask for a Lamborghini. A real one, not a model.

Besides, I’d make a terrible Mrs. Claus. I look ghastly in red.

 

Holy Bathroom, Batman!

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Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Just the other day I went to a bathroom in a public building and noticed a sign on the wall by the door. I thought it was an odd place to put the “All employees must wash hands” sign. Besides, this was a hospital and you’d think all the employees would already be doing that. I would hope, anyway. But the sign should have been over the sink if that were the case at any rate.

So I looked closer at the sign. It read: This room has been dedicated by prayer to the ministry of healing.

I was taken aback. I had never heard of anyone blessing a bathroom before.

Later I learned that this was a religious-affiliated hospital and that all the rooms had been prayed over before they were used, not just the ubiquitous chapel. One employee told me that the hospital encouraged prayer. She was glad because she didn’t have to sneak around and pray with a patient surreptitiously, with an eye on the door or the door closed, which I didn’t know was the case in other hospitals. I guess in some hospitals only the official chaplain is supposed to address the Almighty.

I have used a variety of bathroom facilities over the years, from a two-holer outhouse on my Uncle Sam’s farm to a squat toilet in Croatia’s Roman ruins.

But never have I peed in such a holy restroom.

(I will refrain from making any joke here about sprinkling or anointing the facilities. You’re welcome. And if you want to read my further musings on the topic, go here for “What Were They Thinking? (Toilet Edition)”: https://wp.me/p4e9wS-6T.)

Christmas Comes Creeping

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It’s that time of year again – the time when we all bitch about Christmas Creepage. You know – how Christmas decorations and other fol-de-rol appear earlier every year, so that now they practically impinge on Halloween.

You get no sympathy from me. Here’s why.

First, it’s not going to change. Some businesses have decided to close on Thanksgiving “to be with family,” despite the fact that the only thing anyone buys on Thanksgiving are the dinner rolls you forgot to pick up when you bought the fried onions and mushroom soup for the traditional, little-beloved green bean casserole. But that’s a different matter.

Christmas creepage is purely a matter of the bottom line. If starting the decorating and selling didn’t make a difference in profits, the stores wouldn’t do it. But they both expect and get the Pavlovian response – reminding people of Christmas reminds people that they haven’t finished (or perhaps even started) shopping yet.

Therefore, creeping Christmas tut-tutting belongs in the same category as “You know as soon as they finish paving this road it’ll just be time to pave it again” and “Why do the hot dogs and buns never come out even?” Ritual plaints with no hope of resolution. So if we stop worrying about when the bells start jingling, we can expend our nerve endings on really important matters like “Forget universal health care. Why is there no universal law about where we can buy booze on Sundays?”

That said, there is another reason that angsting over the continual push-back of Christmas starting dates is an exercise in futility. Just as with starving orphans, there is always someone who is worse off than you are.

Consider the employees who work in those stores that commence holiday frivolities sooner than you would like. The clerks and stockers and servers have to put up with hearing the same Christmas tunes every shift, every hour, every day. Mostly involving the colors red (-nosed reindeer) and silver (bells), or speculations on what Santa may or may not be doing (checking lists, kissing Mommy, delivering hippopotami). Because, let’s face it, there are only so many Christmas songs in existence, especially secular ones appropriate to be associated with commerce.

You may not realize it, but there are professions in which preparations for Christmas start even earlier. Religious publishing, for example. So much lead time is required to put out a monthly magazine that editors must start planning their back-to-school issue before school adjourns for the summer. The Christmas issue has to be in process before Labor Day, at least. By the time Christmas actually arrives, the employees threaten to have a breakdown if one more person says, “the reason for the season” or puts up a display of a kneeling Santa.

Craft stores, I think, have it the worst of all. They not only have to sell kits and supplies for making Christmas decorations, they have to sell them in time for crafters to finish them before Thanksgiving (or earlier). Roughly the Fourth of July.

As for me, I’ve pushed Christmas preparations all the way back to January 1st. I once worked in an office in which all the women wore Christmas sweaters, and non-ironically at that. Some even wore Christmas sweatshirts on Casual Fridays, but that leads us back to the craft store dilemma.

I refused to give in to the price-gouging that ensued in December, not to mention the fact that I felt most of the sweaters fell into the category of Ugly Christmas Sweaters. So I waited till January and bought the leftovers at bargain prices. I thought the leftover sweaters were by far the nicest, since they didn’t feature the gung-ho-ho-ho excess of the more popular ones.

I finally acquired a respectable collection (you need four or five, at least, because of course you can’t wear the same one again and again). Then I left that job to go freelance. The Christmas sweaters now reside on shelves in my closet, longing for the day when I get invited to a holiday party. Which doesn’t happen often, probably because no one trusts me not to show up in a Grinch sweater.

 

 

Let’s Call a Truce on Christmas

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I wrote this over a year ago, but it still seems relevant.

Time to choose sides again, folks. There’s a war on Christmas, says Bill O’Reilly. No there isn’t, says Jon Stewart. Christians are being persecuted. Christians are the ones persecuting. “Merry Christmas” is forbidden. “Merry Christmas” is mandatory. The Constitution forbids manger scenes. The First Amendment protects manger scenes.

I hate war metaphors. There are too many of them and they encourage a martial mindset. War on Terror. War on Poverty. War on Drugs. Cupcake Wars. My least favorite hymn is “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”(1) So let’s dispense with the whole “War on Christmas” thing. Until automatic rifles and tactical nukes are involved. Then I’ll be willing to call it a war.

What side am I on, I hear you ask? To quote Tolkien’s Treebeard, “I am not altogether on anyone’s side because nobody is altogether on my side….” (If you promise not to say “the reason for the season,” I will admit that crass commercialism and greed are, I believe, the real forces that threaten Christmas.) So, for what it’s worth, here’s my two cents.(2)

Christians are being persecuted. Yes, they are, and it’s appalling, indecent, and shameful. Christians are being persecuted in Iraq. In North Korea. In India. In China. In other countries around the world. They are being killed or driven out of their homes and towns. They are jailed for preaching and handing out Bibles.

None of that is happening in the U.S., most likely because Christians are in the majority here. Christians are persecuted in places where they are in the minority. If you think you’re being persecuted by being asked to say, “Happy Holidays,” think again.

Christians aren’t allowed to say “Merry Christmas.” Well, sure you can say “Merry Christmas.” Say it to your friends and relatives. Say it to passersby and people in the streets. Say it to Jews and Muslims and Buddhists if you want. The one place saying “Merry Christmas” is frowned on is in the workplace.

Let’s think about this a minute. There are all sorts of things that employers don’t want employees to do in the workplace. Some of them don’t allow facial hair. Some insist that tattoos be covered. No one wants you to come to work with dirt under your fingernails.(3) They don’t allow you to call customers granny or bro or stink face. Why? They want you to show respect, so that customers will keep returning and spending money. Flip it. If every store that Christians went into greeted them with “Happy Hannukah” or “Joyous Eid,” would they feel welcome and respected and want to come back? No?

America is a Christian nation and should follow Christian laws. Here’s where things get sticky. It’s true that many of the founders were Christians.(4) And many of them were getting the hell out of countries that told them what kind of Christians they had to be – Catholics or Protestants. Or Calvinists or Presbyterians. Or nonbelievers.

So it shouldn’t be any surprise that in the U.S. Constitution, the very first Right in the Bill of, it says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”(5)
Simply, the government can’t tell you what religion to be – Christian, Baha’i, Sikh, Jewish, or none of the above. And the government can’t stop you from practicing that religion, or none.(6)

And that’s it. The government can’t show preference to ANY religion, because the founders knew personally how easy it is for that to be abused.

My Freedom of Speech means I can say “Merry Christmas” if I want to. Yes, it does. The government can’t tell you not to, or punish you if you do. But the government also can’t forbid people to say “Joyous Kwanzaa” or “Enjoy the holiday of your choice.”(7) But, as noted, while the government can’t do that, many businesses ask employees not to. Blame them or boycott them if such be your inclination. Just don’t drag the government into it.

But we can’t put up manger scenes in public places. Sure you can. Have the biggest one you want in front of your house or your church or your private school or even your restaurant (if you don’t mind driving away non-Christian customers). But, again, the government wants to stay hands-off. No manger scenes in front of public buildings that everyone of every religion gets to use. Yes, all are welcome at the court building, the IRS offices, and the public schools.(8)(9)

So, that’s the story. It’s government places that have to call things “holiday” this-and-that. Many people and businesses think that’s a good idea and do likewise. Others object, and the government can’t tell them not to. It’s got enough headaches.

But it’s also the government that can’t say a thing about how you choose your holiday or celebrate it or decorate for it or speak about it. And if anyone tries to stop you, the government will tell them to cut out that nonsense.

So when former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) decried anti-Christian persecution in America, comparing it to Nazis and the Holocaust, you can just ignore him. No one here is heating the ovens, and he probably just wanted to get his name in the papers, or votes, or something. Besides, whoever mentions Nazis first, loses the argument. That’s a rule.(10)

Peace, everyone. Can we all agree on that?

(1) We’ll leave the Salvation Army out of this. For now. Except I have to say that I like the ones that play saxophones instead of ringing bells.
(2) Two cents. It’s worth exactly two cents. Duh.
(3) Except for mechanics. They can probably get away with it.
(4) Or at least deists.
(5) In this sentence, “respecting” means “about.” No law about establishment of religion.
(6) Unless you break fundamental laws, like about not beheading people. They get kinda cranky about that.
(7) My favorite. It offends either no one or everyone.
(8) You know, the ones that local, state, and federal governments (that aren’t allowed to mess with religion) let you send your children to for free.
(9) A personal plea: If you do set up a manger scene somewhere, PLEASE don’t do the kneeling Santa thing. It was thought-provoking the first 7,000 times, but now it’s merely provoking.
(10) Godwin’s Rule of Nazi Analogies. It’s in the Third OED, which is authority enough for me.

The Mars Look

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Apparently I am out of sync with much of the world when it comes to humor. I often find find things funny when no one else does. Sometimes this is understandable, as when my martial arts group went to a Jackie Chan movie. The rest of the audience laughed at the funny lines and we laughed at the martial arts.

I also had the opposite experience when I went to the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy. The rest of the audience laughed at what to me were inexplicable times. My theory was that they all had been in the Peace Corps and this was the Jackie Chan thing in reverse.

Sometimes people laugh when I say things that to me seem simple and obvious. Once I wanted to leave a business meeting gracefully and said, “I think we’ve reached that point at which I cease to be helpful.” Hilarity ensued.

But those instances aren’t really examples of The Mars Look. That’s the one when, after I make a statement, silence descends and everyone looks at me as though I’m a two-headed Martian in a sequined Elvis jumpsuit. Crickets chirp. A tumbleweed rolls by.

For example:

I wonder if there are beech trees around here?

Me: Probably. This area is known for truffles, and they only grow around certain trees, including the beech.

[chirp, chirp]

The guitar strings squeaked. I guess you can do that on purpose to annoy people.

Me: Strings squeak when they’re brand-new. After you’ve played them a while, the oil on your fingertips eliminates the squeak.

[enter tumbleweed] [exit tumbleweed]

I guess I’m not supposed to provide information unless someone asks me directly. Or something. I’m not all that good at social situations.

The best Mars Look I ever got was in church. The musicians and the choir struck up the Hallelujah Chorus. At the first note sung, I stood. I was prepared to stand there through the whole thing, even if no one else did. Even my husband gave me the Mars Look.

Behind me I heard murmurs. “I guess we’re supposed to stand.” Slowly, the people in the two or three rows behind me started to stand too. The people in the front heard the murmuring and rustling, turned and saw the people standing, and rose as well. It was like doing the wave at a ball game, only different.

At least that time, there were no crickets and tumbleweeds. Just music.

Valentine’s Day. Bleah.

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I have very few happy memories associated with Valentine’s Day. The only one I can think of offhand is the one when my long-distance boyfriend actually sent me flowers. I took a Polaroid picture of them and married him. (Not directly because of that, but it sure helped.)

I would post the picture of the flowers, but scanning a Polaroid from a hundred or so years ago seldom produces anything but a colorful blob. I suppose I could pass it off as a scanned Polaroid of an Impressionist painting.

But I digress. (I do that a lot.)

Valentine’s Day came to my attention, as it does to most of us, in grade school, where it was shown to be a meaningless exercise. I do not think that making “mailboxes” out of brown paper lunch bags had any actual educational value. And, after the teachers figured out that letting the kids decide whom to give valentines to was a way of separating winners from losers, valentines for every classmate became mandatory. The only technique left to express your true feelings was to decide which valentines you thought were the crappiest and give them to the people you liked least. So perhaps it was an exercise in passive-aggressive behavior, which is an important thing to know and recognize.

Then there were homemade valentines, usually reserved for relatives. These did teach me an important lesson. I would make my paper heart, ask my mother how to spell “valentine,” sign my name, seal the envelope, and continue on to the next. (Lather. Rinse. Repeat.) After about the fifth round of this game, my mother suggested that I write all my cards before I sealed them up, thus having a model for the spelling of “valentine.” It seemed to work.

But again, I digress.

The funny thing (to me) about Valentine’s Day, other than the commercials that equate romantic love with nearly anything you can purchase, is that it reverses the usual ways holidays come to be.

For many (or most) holidays, pagan peoples had a series of holidays celebrating natural events – planting, harvest, astronomical events – and important concepts – fertility, remembering ancestors – throughout the year. The Christian churches did not like to encourage pagan celebrations, but they couldn’t actually say, “Don’t celebrate.” Back then that was about the only fun to be had.

So the various churches took the various pagan holidays and grafted Christian meanings onto them, the most notable being Christmas. I’m not knocking Christmas or saying you shouldn’t believe in it or shouldn’t spend gobs of money on presents. But certain related pagan customs have survived. The Christmas tree was a Druid practice, for example.

(Other graftings did not take as well, so now we have fertility symbols including bunnies and eggs somehow associated with the birth of the Savior.)

However, Valentine’s Day is exactly the opposite sort of holiday. It started out religious and has been so altered that the connection is nearly invisible. St. Valentine was a Christian. He never gave flowers or chocolates or diamonds to anyone. This post that’s been floating around the Internet puts it nicely:

Valentine

(Image from Ethika Politika)

No, what Valentine did was send encouraging notes to other Christians and sign them “Your Valentine” while awaiting execution.

Kind of sucks the romance out of the whole thing, doesn’t it?

I do, however, celebrate Feb. 15, Discount Chocolate Day.

P.S. Don’t get me started on what happens when the government tries to mess with holidays.