dcseain | Goodwill to all men

This is from Financial Times, and reemphasizes what i was teaching the middle-schoolers in Sunday school earlier this month.

Published: December 18 2006 02:00 | Last updated: December 18 2006 02:00

So here's the thing: if you're running some johnny-come-lately
export-oriented religion from the Middle East and you pull off a hostile
takeover of a European pagan winter festival, you can't really complain
if your customers start to ignore the rebranding.

The ritual moaning from cathedral pulpits that Christmas is losing its
true religious meaning is fast becoming a tradition in itself. But in
truth it is not clear it ever really had one. Blatantly goalhanging on
the effort put in by other religions, Christianity managed to
appropriate and re-label extant celebrations, particularly the great
Roman winter solstice festival of Saturnalia. And while the image got a
makeover, the festivities were little changed. Pretty much everything
about Christmas (or Yuletide, its more poetic heathen name) has been
lifted straight out of the pagan book of common prayer.

Here's the deal. Secular (and pagan) celebrants should agree to go to
church over Christmas only if bishops, ministers, priests and their
flocks promise in return to eschew the following: drinking, feasting,
going to parties, singing carols, giving presents, watching pantomimes
and bringing any of three sacred pagan plants - holly, ivy and mistletoe
- into the home. It doesn't sound like a barrel of laughs, exactly.

Various Christian sects have in fact had a go at eliminating the
idolatrous bits of Christmas with predictable and unfortunate results.
Playing a proto-Grinch role to perfection in the 17th century, the
Puritans who overthrew the monarchy and set up the English republic
banned Christmas outright, fining shopkeepers who shut their stores on
December 25.

To no one's great astonishment, the abolition of 12 days of jollity and
calorific and alcoholic excess in the middle of the dark, cold winter
(and throwing in bans on Easter and the saints' days just to hammer home
the point) played badly with the focus groups. When imposed it provoked
the bizarre but somehow heart-warming spectacle of pro-Christmas riots
across England. With mean-spirited bloodlessness like this as an
inspiring principle it is not surprising the republic lasted only 11
years, and that out-and-out Puritanism subsequently became no more than
a niche player in the denominational market.

Equally unconvincing is the contention that only Christians should
celebrate Christmas because it is named after Jesus. By that token a
revivalist squad of militant Norse could go around insisting that, in
English at least, only card-carrying pagans can use the names of the
days of the week. When we thank God it's Friday, we are saluting neither
Jesus nor Jehovah but Freyja, the Germanic goddess of dressing down and
binge-drinking.

Sidelining Christianity during yuletide is not a modish secularist fad
at all but an old and venerable tradition that stretches back centuries.
And what could be more Christmassy than that?

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006