Let's Keep the X in Xmas

I'm kind of skipping Christmas this year. I'm working two jobs, and neither is particularly enriching for the soul. For economic reasons I'm passing on getting gifts for my brood of nieces and nephews, which breaks my heart. I'm not decorating at all. I did buy a box of Christmas cards, though, which I addressed last night.

I found that they are all religious in nature, with depictions of the nativity or angels. Normally I get secular cards, since I'm an atheist and I don't want to offend any Jewish friends. But I got the cheapest box (and you get what you pay for--some of the envelopes included were the wrong size).

This reminds me of the inanity that it is "The War on Christmas." A figment of the imagination of the hosts on Fox News, it's a phony story because some people actually have the courtesy to remember that there are other faiths in this nation besides Christianity, and to tailor there comments to "Happy holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas." Or calling a decorated conifer a "holiday tree" instead of a "Christmas tree."

This boggles my mind. Christmas is doing just fine. The war, as they call it, is merely an acknowledgement that this is not a Christian nation--it is a secular nation, whether they like it or not. People like Bill O'Reilly can celebrate this time as the birth of Christ, that's his prerogative. Why it bothers him that others may not indicates more about him than the society at large. My guess is that he just does it to get his name in the paper.

The birth of Christ was not on December 25th, as far as anyone knows. For example, shepherds would not be tending their flock in the winter, so that's kind of an indication that if the nativity story is true, it wouldn't be in December. The church chose this date, as they did so many other (Easter, Assumption, Candlemas, All Saint's Day, etc.) to coincide with the pagan holidays, which are attuned to the Earth's orbit around the sun. The winter solstice, on December 21, is a key date in the pagan calendar. The "Christmas" tree, for example, has as much to do with Christ as a banana split does. It was brought to England by Prince Albert during Victorian times. It's not a Christmas tree, it's a Solstice tree. Or, yes, it is a holiday tree.

And the carping about "Xmas." This is not an abbreviation that removes Christ from Christmas. The bumper stickers that say "Let's keep the Christ in Christmas," while certainly well-intention, have faulty reasoning. X, in this case, represents the Greek letter Chi, which means Christ (the cross shape, get it?) It's been around for a long time, as indicated by this postcard, and is not a creation of some ad man in the 1906s. Xmas has just as much holiness as Christmas.

There is no war on Christmas, just as it is still, despite the noise from the right, best to be a white male.