With Thanksgiving behind us, the holiday season has arrived and I couldn't be happier. I don't mean for this to be several pages of pouring out my heart about the joys of Christmas and family and the clean slate of a new year, because we all know that would be bullshit, and my momma didn't raise no liar. Don't get me wrong, I do like to see the cousins and my siblings all gathered together. We're mostly grown up now and scattered about, so its always good to have everyone in one place. The late nights of drinking and telling stories are never dull, and people seem to be a little bit cheerier around this time of year. But that isn't the real reason I enjoy the holidays.
No, the real reason I like this celebration of capitalism has very little to do with family and more to do with conflict. See, anytime there's a major conflict going on, especially somewhere on the internet, I get plenty of fodder for my ranting and raving. There is no better conflict for this than Christmas.
The argument about Christmas has many sides, some people rejecting the Christian adoption of what were essentially pagan traditions and bastardizing them by turning it into a celebration of Christ. Still others argue that Christmas has lost all semblence of its Christian roots and become purely a celebration of capitalism and mankind's materialist tendencies. Another group argues that all the holiday cheer and goodness to our fellow man is bullshit, that we're pretending to care because its tradition. The list goes on and on, but these are mostly the big ones. I'd like to address some of them.
First, I'd really like to talk about those pagan traditions the Christians took over. Mostly because of the people who claim that that's such a horrible thing. Why is that so bad? I mean, aside from the plagiarism (you're not likely to hear a typical Christ fellator admitting that many of their traditions came from people they conquered early on) what is the big deal? Alexander the Great did something similar, when he conquered people he would adapt some of their prominent customs as his own or, at the very least, allow them to continue them. In fact, a lot of conquering forces did much the same. Ghengis Khan was one, despite his brutal (read: awesome) battlefield reputation. It was the best way to keep the people under control without using violence. Would I like to see those pagans given credit, rather than the Christians taking creative rights on holidays? Sure. But I'm not getting all bent out of shape and throwing a fucking temper tantrum everytime someone talks about Jehova throwing lightning bolts like he's fucking Zeus. And maybe my stance on religion has something to do with it, but I'd like to think this idea of just letting it go has more to do with my ability to reason than anything.
The second thing I want to talk about is this whole capitalism versus Christianity thing. People take issue with the fact that Christmas is the biggest shopping season of the year, what with people spending enormous amounts of money on possessions. They'll point out that this is our need to own things at its worst, and how commercial this once holy celebration has become. Fuck that noise. First of all, the tradition of giving gifts is one of those things that dates back to about the same time Christmas started gaining its "holiday status" (as the gangsters would say). There's nothing wrong with exchanging gifts with your loved ones, right? The gifts were different and the traditions were slightly different, but so was society.
Think about it, back then we had more immediately physical things to worry about. Plague, for instance. People were less informed about the natural world and, thus, more prone to superstition which made them more prone to being devoutly religious. As we've grown over the centuries, our economies have changed, our knowledge of the world around us has expanded, and the things we worry about have become more personal and less physical. All in all, we're better informed and, therefore, less likely to practice our beliefs the way we did five hundred years ago. So, religious belief and the "traditional" family dynamic is more of a symbolic thing now. A great deal of people pay lip service to it out of tradition, and those people go through the motions of going to Mass or whatever their specific denomination demands. Other people don't bother.
Additionally, our families are bigger. Whereas a few hundred years ago we didn't live very long and many families had trouble growing in size, we have all kinds of great-grandparents and third cousins these days. Since our ability to communicate and travel is much more advanced than it was way back when, we feel somewhat obligated to exchange gifts with even the most distant (physically and relation-wise) family. And the neighbors. And our friends. And our Facebook friends. And our pets. And our friends' pets. Its reasonable to assume that we'll be spending more energy buying gifts now than we would have then. We can, because we don't have to worry about whether or not the neighbor is a witch. Or a Jew. Additionally, in a country like this one we have a much broader variety of products than we used to and, therefore, a bigger scope of interests. Your kids might like Ninja Turtles. Your sister likes Hannah Montana. Your cousin from Bermuda plays World of Warcraft for days on end.
What I'm saying is, simply because consumerism is at a high doesn't mean the spirit of the season, or whatever bullshit name you want to put on it, is lost. It means we're spending a lot of money, time, and energy to make sure it isn't lost. And those people fighting over gifts and getting pissed off about the lines? Those people are batshit crazy. Just ignore them.
The third group is partly right. Just like some of us pay lip service to our respective gods, some of us pretend to be in good spirits during the holidays. The rest of us just enjoy the spectacle. Whether its the lights, the food, the family gatherings, the drunken brawls, or whatever gets your rocks off, this is a unique time of year. Charities take advantage of people's happy feelings and ask for donations. It gets bigger from there. The point is, some people are shitty human beings and the rest of us enjoy this last vestige of joy before the onset of another (possibly endless) winter. Give it a fucking rest.
For me, nothing is better than a good old religion versus economics battle of minds. The problem is that most of the minds are locked down far too tight to be of any use in warfare. Poor, witless bastards won't even know they're casualties of something they barely understood until their unintelligible words suddenly fall silent, their heads having exploded from reading a complete sentence.
Happy Holidays,
-S.R.
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