Wars on Christmas and other nonsense

This isn't about writing, but over on Greg Laden's blog there is an entry that, in my view, is extremely appropriate for this time of year. It's about the supposed "war on Christmas". Every year, it seems as if certain segments of the population(in the US, at least), declare some "war on Christmas". This year, according to Laden, there are bloggers who have declared that Richard Dawkins, the famous atheist evolutionary biologist who wrote The God Delusion earlier this year, actually sings Christmas carols! Jeez! Horrors! How terrible! An atheist singing Christmas carols! What desecration, according to these bloggers.

Now on this blog, I almost never interject "political" material. This is primarily a writer's blog, after all, and I'm more interested in publishing my own struggles with my writing, plus the science that inspired it, where appropriate. I have not yet, but probably will, comment on some of the historical material which inspired what I'm currently writing. I am extremely firm about keeping "politics" out of it.

But the idiocy(again in my view) of these bloggers claiming to have some "handle" on the one, true, and right way to celebrate Christmas(or any other important religious or secular holiday for that matter), just totally boggles my mind. Because Dr. Laden's family basically sounds a lot like mine. For that matter, Dr. Laden's family sounds like an increasing number of American families in this day and age. In other words, as generations pass and children grow up and form families of their own, there is an increasingly wider pool of traditions, religious and secular, to draw from. In my own family, there are people who were born in Mexico. There are people of several different "races". A cousin of mine adopted children from China, when this was still possible. And so on and so on. This kind of thing is getting more and more common, as immigrants come to this country, often from places we barely knew existed when we were growing up, and traditions, religious and otherwise, are quite different from anything my generation knew. And Christmas has never been quite the "sacred" time that these bloggers seem to imagine it once was. Any social historian can easily tell you this

But this doesn't stop these bloggers from pronouncing on who can "celebrate Christmas" and who can't. I suspect that, by their own standards, they could not have "celebrated Christmas" 200 years ago, right here in the infant US. But again, logic and historical/social records are of no concern to these people. They're far more interested in chipping away at tolerance and inclusiveness(for their own reasons, none of them, again in my view, particularly good ones), to pay attention to that. What's even worse is, at the time Jesus lived, I have a horrible feeliing that they would not have been able to find room at any inn for Mary and Joseph, and later, when Jesus was a grown man, they would have been exactly the kind of people who sided with the Romans. Ugh.

Have a better Christmas than that and a New Year full of happiness and peace,
Anne G