It's been a sad Christmas.

[rogerashton]

For more than one reason. My stint in the hospital didn't help. But even before that --

I was raised in a freethinking household -- Dad was an atheist, whom I wrote about here recently, and mother was a deist. She would kid about her deism, but nobody else was allowed to! So none of us believed in the stuff about the virgin Mary giving birth to a human being who embodied God, but we celebrated Christmas anyway. After all, it isn't really a Christian holiday. It is Yule, the celebration of the time the days start to get a little longer; it is Mithras' birthday; the Wise Men are Magi -- Zoroastrian priests hoping for the birth of a new Sayoshant, a successor to Zoroaster. Above all, since the 19th century, it has been a celebration of childhood, and my sister and I were children. We knew that the "baby Jesus" was a myth, but it seemed a warm and harmless myth that we were happy to remember and celebrate.

For years thereafter, I loved the music, Christian as most of it was. I was not one of those bothered by Christian and theistic words in the great hymns, and indeed often complained about the softening of the hymns in my Unitarian-Universalist hymn-book. With a few others, I would sing the traditional words -- quitely, because I am a poor singer, but not out of embarrassment. I would annoy my wife by putting Christmas music on the day after Thanksgiving. So I did this year. And I found it depressing.

It depressed me because it reminded me of the evil, agressive, fundamentalist Christian ayatollas who held my nation in thrall and who seemed in particular to want to attack the kind of secular Christmas I had enjoyed while cramming the whole Jesus-Mary and Joseph myth down the throats of Americans as a matter of national policy. If they wanted to destroy the secular Christmas, then they had succeeded in my case. They had succeeded in making the whole idea of Christmas in any sense repellent, a threat, a whiff of the gas ovens.

I don't want to take any notice of Christmas any more, but I can't impose that on my wife, who has a healthy ability not to notice certain things.

But for me, Christmas has become a symbol of a ruthless enemy who threatens my survival.

[Kikosexy2]

1. I've...

stopped worrying being oh too politically correct anymore! Why? Because things have gotten way too overboard. So celebrate/observe holidays as you see fit and f*#k everyone else. Don't like it...BITE ME!

[Not_Giving_Up]

2. I agree

People in this country were getting upset about HOW they were wished well, how petty can you be? I think next year, I'm just going to say go "f*ck yourself" in lieu of Happy Holidays or any of the rest of it.

I have also come to associate the RWNJ's and Fundies (even though I have dem/fundie parents), and anything even remotely biblical now boils my blood.

[Kikosexy2]

4. A Cheney...

holiday greeting?...Fabulous!

[WI_DEM]

3. Just enjoy the holidays with your family and friends

in the way you like to and don't worry about the fundamentalists. They are in the minority. Most Christians are not automatically judgemental, anti-gay Bush supporters.

[Not_Giving_Up]

7. My in-laws are repukes

to the bone, but they have no (voiced) relgious affliation. It's the weirdest thing I've ever seen.

I was lucky enough to take my kids to see MY grandparents for a while. My husband stayed behind and got to hear about how our children need religion. I got the condensed version over the phone later.

When I was rounding the kids up I heard someone saying something about troops, *, and I said, yep, time to go!

[jellybelly]

5. no...

these crazy war-loving psychos aren't Christian. And if some people want to believe in Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, they have a right to without being lumped in the same group as these war terrorists. Christmas can be both a secular and religious holiday. I won't judge people who believe in Christianity, and I won't judge your way of celebrating Christmas.

[LiberalEsto]

6. Don't let them win

I think I can understand some of your feelings. It's been a bad year, a bad 2 months.

This year part of me has wanted to grieve instead of celebrate -- because of the election fraud, the potential destruction of what's left of our democracy, and mainly because of the senseless horror in Iraq.

I decided to try having a decent Yule/Christmas anyway, for the sake of my daughters, who are 18 and 21. Who knows how many more Christmases there will be with all four of us together?

I took the red ribbons off the artificial evergreen wreaths we hang on the windows, and replaced them with blue ones. Then I cut out a couple of white peace dove shapes from an old placemat and attached them to the wreaths. Then I put up a modest string of white mini-lights.

When it came time to write the Annual Holiday Letter, I just couldn't do it. I lost my fulltime job this summer, having worked only 8 months after 13 months of unemployment. Now I'm working again, but very part-time. I went through a severe clinical depression this fall, made worse by the election results. My whole family has been depressed about this.

So I wrote the ranting, raving, cussing holiday letter I really felt like writing - it's titled "Merry F*cking Xmas." I'd have posted it here but didn't know if the moderators would object to the use of the word f*cking (asterisk included) about 30-40 times. That got a lot out of my system, at least temporarily.

Finally I decided to put my disappointment and anger on the back burner for a few days, just to have a mental and physical break. There's plenty of opportunity in January to be as furious as I want to be.

To my surprise, Yule and Christmas went very well. No family arguments! Yesterday we were getting the Sunday after Christmas blues, and Dave was visiting his dad in NJ, so the girls and I decided to have a British-style afternoon tea as a change of pace, and it was a lot of fun.

I am not going to let those Xtian psychos take my holidays away from me... or tell me how to celebrate them.

[rogerashton]

8. I don't think I said "all Christians." But let's think about that.

Recently one of my students, an aggressive Christian, challenged me as to whether I am ignorant of the Bible. (We had had a Christian, liberal, guest speaker in the course I was team-teaching, and while I tried my best to avoid this sort of confrontation, I was not allowed to). I was able to say that I am not ignorant of the Bible. By a happy coincidence I had consulted my parallel New Testament (eight translations on the same page! Wonderful!) the very previous evening.

I have read much of the Bible but not all. I just could never get interested in the Chronicles, and tried the Book of John but found it repellent. But I have read enough to realize this:

You can find a "proof text" in the Bible to support anything from Communism to slavery, anything from pacifism to mass murder.

No, let us suppose that were a description of the scripture of some other religion. Doohickianism, let's say. Would we not conclude from that that Doohickians are so unpredictable as to be dangerous, given that they can find proofs in their scriptures that their divinity requires just anything of them?

So the fact that not all Christians believe in fascism -- while helpful -- is neither surprising nor very reassuring.