Let's declare war on Christmas

[Image by Dorkafok at InDCJournal]

Christmas has not been about the celebration of Jesus' birth for a long time. Sure, some people go to church on this holiday and others may even read the two birth stories in Matthew and Luke, but for the most part it is celebrated as a secular holiday, even by Christians.

And that isn't a bad thing, for it coincides with the Winter Solstice and there are other religious holidays that come up on the calendar about the same time such as Hanukkah and Kwanza. So Christmas becomes part of the holiday season.

The trouble isn't with any of these religious celebrations or any pagan celebrations; it has to do with how we celebrate Christmas.


If you've been shopping at your favorite mall or your favorite store(s) in the past few days, you know the crowds have already grown ferocious and that it will only get worse between now and the middle of January: the shopping spree doesn't end on December 26, it just morphs into the "After-Xmas" sales and then the "New Year's" sales.

It is a madhouse out there, witness the trampling of a man to death in a Wal-Mart in New York State. In some cases, it's an armed madhouse - to borrow a phrase from Greg Palast - witness the shooting of two people in a Toys R Us in Palm Desert, California.


Christmas for most people is primarily about buying and consuming. For not a few it means going into debt to purchase junk gifts for children and other family members that often are neither needed nor wanted.

For many folks, Christmas also means decorating one's house with a tree (fake or real) covered with ornaments, littering the lawn with absurd plastic figures, cheap and gaudy creches and/or scrawny wire figurines and then draping the whole place with thousands of lights which send the electric bill into orbit.

We musn't forget all the hokey parades and the soupy, sentimental, crappy Christmas movies on TV. Between now and December 25, we'll have so many Christmas "specials" that the word "special" could better be defined as commonplace.

In the malls, all sorts of faux festivities take place in order to relieve you of your hard-earned cash (too often via credit card). It's difficult to get very far without hearing the screeching, sometimes in fear, of small children plopped on the lap of a faux Santa Claus with boozy breath, surrounded by faux snow and faux trees.

All of this culminates either Xmas eve or Xmas morning when the kids and parents, or whoever the kids are living with at the moment, gather around the tree to tear open their piles upon piles of presents faster than Mom can write down who they're from and then ask, amid the crush of crumpled paper and strewn ribbon, "Is that all?" "When do we eat?"

And a few minutes later, "I'm bored. There's nothing to do!"


It's too much. It's enough to drive a sane person insane and none of it has a damn thing to do with anything other than helping the purveyors of consumption make their sales projections.

We need to declare war on Christmas!

No mas! Get rid of it! Toss the baby with the bath water, so to speak. Excise it completely from our lives! It has become a meaningless and useless collection of expensive rituals that have no connection with anything. Churches could still hold services for people who feel the need to celebrate the 2000-year old birth of a Palestinian Jew, but there should be nothing of Christmas outside of those religious institutions.

I don't think Jesus would mind at all.

Here's why.

She's probably in her 50's. A small, black woman who has worked for the same department store for 27 years. She's very kind, gentle, soft-spoken and helpful to her customers. She likes her job. Usually.

But not at Christmas.

Today, already weary, she said, "You know, I've never been able to enjoy Christmas."

"What? Why not?" I asked.

"Because I worry so much about the day after. The store becomes a crazy place with people rushing around, grabbing the after-Christmas sales. And then all the returns! It's very hard!"


Let the war on Christmas begin!