I usually enjoy customs and rituals, especially when they are sanctioned by age and tradition. Some of the newer ones, however, get on my last nerve.
A case in point is the recent holiday ritual of the annual Christmas jihad, a feeding frenzy of pretended persecution and pseudo-martyrdom the coming of which is heralded not by the singing of angels but by the braying of jackasses.
The jackasses in question summon the faithful via the airwaves to a veritable hissy fit of outrage over the fact that some people have the gall to say "happy holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas." This apparently is seen to be the latter day equivalent of being fed to the lions in the Roman coliseum.
As a practicing although not entirely successful Christian who celebrates Christmas, this seems bizarre. I don’t personally care how I’m greeted at that season, having learned as a child that it’s rude to get angry when someone wishes you well, however they express it. But there is more to this than bad manners.
At a moral level, it’s pretty perverse when a person claiming to be a follow of Jesus walks into a big box store where the products were made by women and children in sweatshops who live in miserable conditions, is waited on by a person who probably doesn’t earn a living wage or have health insurance, and only manages to get mad if the worker says something other than "Merry Christmas."
This is the kind of thing the real Jesus—remember him?—called "straining at gnats and swallowing camels." In fact, I don’t think any of the gospels quotes Jesus as saying "Thou shalt get royally ticked off if the occasion of my birth is not marked by everyone exactly according to your liking." Maybe I missed that part.
At a religious level, there is something pretty blasphemous about thinking that the current annual Saturnalia of materialism, greed, commercialism, and over-consumption in a world where billions of people are desperately poor has anything to do with the person or birth of Jesus. As I recall, when Jesus himself was exposed to the commercialization of sacred things in the Temple, he started overturning tables and raising a ruckus.
The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus was probably onto something when he said that true impiety consisted of "attributing to the gods the ideas of the crowd."
At a semantic level, there seems to be some confusion about persecution and how to deal with it. Jesus was literally persecuted to death. When he warned his followers to expect the same and told them to bless and pray for their persecutors, he probably didn’t have the greeting "Happy holidays" in mind.
Maybe a real example of persecution would help clear things up. About 25 years ago, three American nuns and a church worker went to El Salvador to stand with oppressed people. They did this because they took Jesus’ teachings about justice for the poor seriously. (Apparently these teachings have been excised from some versions of the New Testament.) They were kidnapped by the Salvadoran National Guard and were raped, tortured, shot, and buried in an unmarked grave precisely for being faithful to the Gospel.
That was persecution.
Equating a generic holiday greeting with persecution is an insult to thousands of authentic Christian martyrs from the stoning of Stephen to the present day.
At the historical level, no one knows exactly when Jesus was born, although most scholars would put their money on any day but Dec. 25. The earliest church didn’t mark the holiday. By the year 200, the church father Clement of Alexandria found that the people who tried to mark the exact day did so "overly curiously." Early dates from around that period set the birth in March, April or June.
The Dec. 25 date didn’t catch on in the western church until the 4th century of the Christian era. This time of year was already celebrated in pagan customs honoring Saturn, Mithras, and the return of the sun after the winter solstice. A lot of other Christmas customs, including trees, Yule logs, and the exchange of gifts were adapted from Mediterranean, Germanic or Celtic paganism. In other words, there are a lot of reasons for things done at that season.
I think the decision of the ancient church to fill the calendar with sacred days marking key events in the life of Jesus, the early church and the saints was a wise one, even if the days don’t match up exactly. Maybe one reason some people get so weird about Christmas is that they have an impoverished sense of the sacred year. Making do just on Christmas and Easter from this perspective is kind of like playing cards with just two in the deck.
When I buy gas on Jan. 1, for example, I don’t get worked up if the person says "Happy New Year" instead of "Happy Feast of the Circumcision of Our Lord." I don’t tell the people I’m taking my business elsewhere if they don’t say "Happy Epiphany" on January 6. I’m even OK if folks don’t wish me a happy Nativity of John the Baptist on June 24th.
It was encouraging last year to read a thoughtful letter to the editor about Christmas in the Huntington West Virginia paper where it was suggested that we make it unacceptable to "use this holy day as a means of profit monetarily." Instead, the writer recommended that "If you want to give, give your time and talents to those who truly are in need, not greed. Give to your church and the poor, the homeless, the sick and inform, the lonely and downtrodden and all others who otherwise may be or have been forgotten."
If people took that advice, they’d be too busy to get their undergarments in a knot over holiday greetings. We really don’t need any more jihads.
I’m already starting my wish list for next Christmas. I’m asking St. Nicholas, the 4th century bishop of Myra who somehow got morphed into Santa Claus, to help the Christmas jihad crew find something better to do next holiday season.
Or, failing that, to find them a different religion to disgrace.
(Note: this is adapted from The Goat Rope, a social and economic justice blog with gratuitous animal pictures.)