This post inspired me to finally write about Christmas, though I've been thinking about this for a while.
It's now the 26th, and although the shops are still filled with Christmas merchandise (now heavily discounted) and all the houses still have their lights up, the holiday is over and we're moving towards the new year.
Although I am Jewish, Christmas was always a pretty big deal in my extremely assimilated-to-the-point-of-nonexistence Jewish family. (I tried to get us to light Chanukah candles at one point when I was a kid, but it just didn't catch on.) My maternal grandmother had a little flashing pin shaped like a Christmas light, which she'd wear every December. My parents always got a tree and we decorated it. We'd have presents, Christmas dinner, the works. To this day, my mother still fills Christmas stockings for my sister and me, though, now that we're in our thirties, toys have been replaced by packages of stockings and small kitchen gadgets.
However, my relationship to the holiday has definitely changed over the years. Relatives have become less mobile with advancing age, some have died, and others have just moved further away and it's become harder to organize a single family get-together. Thanksgiving has become the biggie — it's just somehow less emotionally fraught, and consequently more fun. (It's all about the food.)
And now I am married to a Jewish man who thinks it's very odd that a Jewish family would make such a big deal of this Christmas thing. Christmas, to him, means going out for Chinese food and catching a movie.
I'm also working at a Jewish organization which has made me acutely aware of the Jewish holiday calendar. I amuse my mother by explaining Shmini Atzeret and Simchat Torah.
Slowly, over the years, my holiday center of gravity has shifted.
Still, none of this makes me feel bad about Christmas, and I still get a little thrill from seeing the Christmas lights, the ice skating rink set up in Justin Herman Plaza, the singers dressed in costume in the grocery store the other day, and I'm as materialistic as anyone else and enjoy receiving gifts, and even giving gifts... I can even tolerate the Christmas music up to a point. (Though I think my favorite songs are the ones by the Kinks and the Waitresses).
This year, though, I'm feeling more uncomfortable. Is it the rampant commercialism? Yeah, that doesn't help, but that has long been a part of the holiday here. (I avoided the shops the day after Thanksgiving like the plague!) You don't have to give in to the madness. Sometimes, I even pretend that I live in a foreign country. Would I be annoyed if everyone had their Eid decorations up? (Er... do people put up decorations for Eid?)
But really, it all comes down to the tempest in a teapot that was the "controversy" over stores that — gasp! — say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" to their customers. Hell, I've said "Happy Holidays" for years! Why not? It covers Chanukah, Christmas, New Year's, Kwanzaa, the Solstice... you name it.
These are the people behind it. We have Bill O'Reilly, saying "You have a predominantly Christian nation. You have a federal holiday based on the philosopher Jesus. And you don't wanna hear about it? Come on, [caller] — if you are really offended, you gotta go to Israel then." We have some guy from the Catholic League saying, "Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular." It is deeply, deeply creepy.
And I wonder what's going on here. It's their holiday. Most of the country celebrates it. We have a strongly Christian president. The tide is seemingly turning in favor of those who want their religion to feature prominently in public life. They should be happy. While celebrating the birth of their Savior, they could also be taking the time to reflect on the man he'd grow up to become, reread his teachings, and really take them to heart. It's supposed to be a holiday of "comfort and joy." Yet all they can do is point fingers, play on fears and hatred of "the other", and keep tabs on who is publicly observing the holiday the way they think it should be. Why are they trying to out-Taliban the Taliban?
This column by Roger Ebert really says it all for me:
This is really an argument between two kinds of prayer--vertical and horizontal. I don't have the slightest problem with vertical prayer. It is horizontal prayer that frightens me. Vertical prayer is private, directed upward toward heaven. It need not be spoken aloud, because God is a spirit and has no ears. Horizontal prayer must always be audible, because its purpose is not to be heard by God, but to be heard by fellow men standing within earshot.To choose an example from football, when my team needs a field goal to win and I think, ''Please, dear God, let them make it!''--that is vertical prayer. When, before the game, a group of fans joins hands and ''voluntarily'' recites the Lord's Prayer--that is horizontal prayer. It serves one of two purposes: to encourage me to join them, or to make me feel excluded.
Although some of the horizontal devout are sincere, others use this prayer as a device of recruitment or intimidation. If you are conspicuous in your refusal to go along, they may even turn and pray while holding you directly in their sights.
This simple insight about two kinds of prayer, which is beyond theological question, should bring a dead halt to the obsession with prayer in public places. It doesn't, because the purpose of its supporters is political, not spiritual. Their faith is like Dial soap: Now that they use it, they wish everyone would. I grew up in an America where people of good breeding did not impose their religious convictions upon those they did not know very well. Now those manners have been discarded.
You can't enforce holiday spirit, but you can do a great deal to destroy it. Someone is destroying it, but it's not the atheists and it's not the Jews. What would Jesus really do? I wish these hypocrites would ask themselves that.
For everyone else, I hope you had good holidays, whichever they were for you.
Leave a comment