I know this is the time of year for peace and goodwill towards man, but I'm soooooo sick of the comercialism. There is nothing truthful about Christmas. Jesus wasn't even born in December! The only reason we celebrate Christmas this time of year is because the church wanted to convert more Pagans so they put Christmas at the same time as when we celebrate the solstice.
I know I'm going to piss off a lot of people with this, but I'm sick of people living the lies. Not that many people will even admit the truth as to how the holiday came along. Not only do people live the lie of the holiday, but they've comercialized it so much that it's unrecognizable. It's utterly disgusting.
Now, I'm not talking about all religious holidays, right now I'm only talking about Christmas. Leave it to the Christians to take a simple Pagan seasonal ritual and turn it into the birth of their savior and comercialize it beyond recognition. It's enough to make me sick.
I understand that it's easier to go along with the lies than fight against them, especially in the workplace and schools where it isn't "okay" to be different and believe your own beliefs. I am so disgusted with being treated like a leper because I don't want to celebrate Christmas.
Well, I'm not going to this year! I went to a solstice party the other night and that is enough celebrating for me. I'm just glad I don't have to deal with places like malls and big stores until after x-mas, that way I don't have to deal with people in bad moods doing things to make others happy, and all that terrible music. I'm sorry, but Neil Diamond is Jewish, he shouldn't feel compelled to put out x-mas music just because his agent or record label think he should do it.
Sorry about the vent, but I'm just so disgusted. I'd better stop now before I get myself into a total uproar.
Later days,
Ken
About Me
- Ken
- I went to Newbury College for fashion design, but have done very little with my degree. While in college a prof told me I should write. A few years ago I learned about nanowrimo (.com). This past November I finished my 7th 50K challenge!
1 comment:
Hi, this is robertsloan2 commenting, I just didn't want to go through registering and all. :)
I'm bookmarking your blog, thank you!
On topic: Christmas Commercialism
I like the way it's become much more spread out over many different seasonal holidays in some circles. One year in New Orleans, the First UU Church celebrated Kwanzaa, Chanukkah, Pagan Solstice and Christmas on successive Sundays, focusing on sharing the commonalities and celebrating the differences between what different folks did for the holidays. It was too bad there were only four because there are other traditions too and it would've been cool to get some atheists in talking about free thought and appealing as you just did to people NOT to shun folks who just don't want to bother.
We did a strange sweet quiet Solstice at the Writerhouse. This was the year we formed the household, everyone was tight on money, and two of the writers are getting married. One of those two has a five year old girl. Starweaver and I had a lot of fun with planning gifts. We all did presents. 95% of the holiday budget went into actual gifts -- and most of my time in December went into gifts too. It was, for me, the year I went all out, stood up like an adult and gathered the resources in my reach and was able to buy or paint gifts for most of my closest friends and loved ones.
That was a big deal for me because too many years of my life I've been completely dependent on others, often in situations where the people who took me in genuinely cared -- but had a hard time wrapping their heads around treating a dependent as an adult. The people at the homeless shelter had an even harder time with it. My friends at least tried. They patronized every resident. I didn't have the resources for gift giving during the shelter years except one friend who usually bought me something cool and I did him a painting.
I think the gift giving is either horrible or wonderful depending on how it's done.
Writerhouse presents were all real things, either bought gifts that were tools to do something cool given to someone with a real interest in it, art materials mostly, or real art done from the heart knowing that person, knowing what they like, seeing what would look good with the stuff they already have, very intimate giving. I wound up with a totally unexpected exchange when Goover, a young member of SFFmuse who introduced me to DeviantArt, gave me one of her Christmas drawings -- in the same spirit. She didn't do anime even though she loves anime. She drew me a cat, knowing I'm a cat nut, a cat painting that in many ways is the best of her work. I'm all mushy over it. Neat friend-thing. Something to go on the "A" wall right over my monitor where the coolest art does.
I had food stamps and did a food basket for Kati because that's what she wanted, and because there's something special about not getting a packaged one but taking a list of her personal specific favorite treats that cost too much and putting those together into a basket no one else would like as much -- and then it didn't get packaged. We didn't even wrap these gifts. They started arriving right around Solstice and everyone got very laid back about presentation, it was all in smiles and hugs instead of tinsel and lights.
We decorated the house with Chami's drawing of a reindeer and some of her school projects. Some talk about a tree didn't jell because by the time it was Christmas-outside, we had Solstice a couple of days before and were all sitting there having a happy after-holiday play-with-the-new-toys mood. Some of the gift art is getting sent or handed over late. One of my paintings isn't getting done till it's done because the guy it was for posed for his portrait on the 27th. It went like that. Weird and not real flashy but deeply warm.
I used to love the tinsel and lights. I used to love Christmas shopping in the years I had budget for it because I liked to go around looking at all the displays like a little kid and whistling stupid songs. I wasn't Christian but it was fun and I decided theologically that it was not at all against my pagan beliefs to consider Santa Claus an important kachina and a beautiful spirit. And that it wasn't the particular young god Christ's fault that every single thing he ever said in the stories has been hypocritically gone against by some church or other officially, let alone the random loudmouths who mysteriously claim to be the only real Christians while blowing off anything he said about love and getting along with people and all the other reasonably good philosophy things in the guy's ideas. Not his fault. Not my religion but not his fault.
I can see your point of view so easily.
Outside in the world, most of the people who put as much time and attention into the holiday as we did were dropping to the worst aspects of life during the holiday. People went shopping and went nuts fighting to get through the stores. Parents dragged kids screaming through stores. Everyone went crazy with greed and the gift-giving in many people's lives has a competitive edge a lot like Northwest Coast potlatches -- it is to establish status by spending a lot of money on gifts and being able to afford to give more expensive and more frivolous and more fickle-fashionable gifts than others you know.
Some people traveled great distances to spend time with people they couldn't stand and drop a quarter of the year's budget on gifts for them. Sometimes some of those gifts were power trips or control trips or guilt trips. Subscriptions to magazines about something the giver wants the receiver to take up -- like fashion magazines if a girl's not wearing makeup and being too butch, or Hunt & Fish if a boy's too artistic and not being butch enough to suit the givers. Conservative clothing for goth weirdos that they'd never wear. The return counters buzz as busy as the sale counters did just because of the number of hostile gifts slung around during the season, gifts that make the "spirit of the season" something like "Gotcha."
Under the same rock is the way poverty gets sentimentalized. Because of a few good stories that didn't sentimentalize it at all, but showed moments of real compassion or empathy or hope, the best in people's spirits, the imitations ring like cash registers and homeless people get one month out of the year when if they are pretty and probably white and dressed appealing enough, say, children or elderly or single mothers all thin and worried and surrounded by children, aww, help them out. With the corollary that the whole rest of the year they're not cute cuddly adorably kitten-types but scrawny mangy flea-ridden who needs 'em feral cats to chase off. Just like people who adopt kittens or puppies and toss them back on the street when they grow into cats or dogs.
It's okay to sound like Scrooge all year and blame anyone unlucky as deserving it, lumping everyone who had a rough time together in a group with the occasional worst case of someone who is a thief or fraud or drunk or junkie, and ignoring all the ordinary people who are neither saintly waifs nor down and out rotten criminal crazies on the skids but just had a major disaster in their otherwise ordinary lives. Disabled especially get the patronizing treatment, which makes for some strange, strange states of mind when what's given is real and needed and talking about that would mean throwing out the one month you do get to eat or the one practical gift someone less patronizing put in.
Grooming aids do matter when someone's thinking of dropping off anonymous gifts at a homeless shelter, they're year-round useful and aren't used up with the season. So is anything practical like a wallet or a belt or a lady's purse, something that looks normal and nice and not bunged up that won't scream "homeless scum" at a job interview. To go back to the best of times of year after the worst, one of the most moving gift-stories about homelessness is a kid who started raising money and saving money to buy two things for homeless children. She got each kid a piece of luggage -- a cheap ordinary nice zippered nylon travel bag usually, and put a stuffed animal in it. One toy, and something to carry whatever else is yours in that isn't a trash sack.
She got it going as a charity and has now through getting bigger and bigger sponsors managed to start something that did that for approximately a third of the homeless children in the country, and it is year round. The bags and toys don't always come in Santa season. They come in and go out as fast as the organization can handle them and may do so much to change people's lives, because that kind of thing makes a difference to pride and self esteem, it's tangible permanent comfort, it raises status to human again from trash.
I'm still grateful to everyone who while I was homeless turned out their attics and junk drawers to give me little things I needed that they just didn't want -- yard sale stuff, most of it. And everyone who did that when I was starving and struggling on art and didn't have to buy furniture because someone had stuff to get rid of that was still good, because a couple of times I had to live without furniture even though I had an apartment.
It was so strange to be up in the group of people who can give as well as receive this year, skip the tinsel and most of the songs and movies and television and not really miss it. To treat all my gift projects as more important to do it well than fast and not worry about lateness. To be one little step away from needy and no longer a potential Christmas decoration myself.
It would be nice if more people got into it in ways that aren't hypocritical. Listened to the words of the songs they sing. Give out of generosity and warmth instead of just to feel superior. Receive without grumpiness or embarrassment if it was well meant and not a hostile takeover, at least manage to be polite and keep dignity when it is.
And when faced with the annual reminder that there are starving people and poor people and homeless people out there, some of whom do look like the Cratchetts and work full time as well as those who don't -- there are homeless people with full time jobs who can't manage first and last or get housing because they don't make enough to cover three times the rent or don't have a good enough credit history -- go ahead and indulge but do it with something that's still there in January and March and July, like the kid with the suitcases and teddybears.
I may get into the tinsel and stuff next year. But Starweaver and I cut most of the shopping crap by doing our real shopping online in one "free shipping" binge and kept that simple, so did not get assaulted by every ad and every harassed clerk and every grumpy shopper dragging around under Obligation with greedy kids chomping our ankles and snatching stuff out of our hands or screaming. There's ways to do it well and ways to make it the worst month of the year, and after so many different holidays in so many different years -- this year's was very special. And nothing like what you described. :)
It's all real. It's just a month that's bigger than life and it's going to have everything happening at once. The whole question of "what to do for Christmas" comes up in traditional Jewish families where the big religious holiday is the family seder and there's a host of customs just as ancient -- and some choose to do stockings-and-tree as secular for fun to be sociable, and some don't. I guess that's the same for other groups that do have tight communities, but the ones I've known personally were Jewish families. Sometimes it blends and I see a house decorated with lights and a big menorah, everything blue and white, and smile, reminded that it's not all cliche but the "peace on earth" bit is enriched when anyone does that.
So if I get enough lights maybe I'll set a pentacle blazing on the house with green lights for Mother Gaia and set out a not-quite standard mother and child, bring back and artistically reinterpret the pagan roots of the buried-Pagan buried-Christian surface-economic holiday... because in the long run it does provide a lot of people fun, laughter, something to do in the winter when it's rotten out and boring. But it shouldn't be mandatory. Ever.
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