With December 25th now upon us many reflect upon
the exact meaning of the date. When considering the meaning one might want to
consider your personal meaning vs. third party meanings. Stated alternatively, the
individual meaning, your meaning, is much more important than your-third-party-betters
inflicting their particular brand of meaning upon you.
When one reflects upon one’s personal and individual meaning
of December 25th, regardless of your particular preference, one
should note the attempted influence of your-third-party-betters inflicting
their particular brand of meaning upon you. One should take fastidious note of
those third-party-betters that want to define the moment, tell you their
definition should be your definition, that their particular view is
supposedly more enlightened and much more intellectual.
One needs to be sure to understand that December 25th
is merely one of three hundred and sixty five days in which your-third-party-betters
inflict their particular brand of meaning upon you.
With the above in mind, here are some interesting
observations from Jonah Goldberg and Daniel Henninger:
“And those are just the highlights. Incapable of getting
around the inconvenient first six letters of the word “Christmas,” more and
more people have decided to duck the issue entirely. Increasing numbers of
public schools insist on celebrating “winter solstice.” Congress cannot send
out “Christmas” cards. The governor of Rhode Island declared that the
traditional Christmas tree would henceforth be christened — whoops! I mean called
— a “holiday tree.”
I have no grand solutions. I don’t know how you could pass a
law to fix any of this. Nor am I sure we would want to. This is a cultural
problem, and the only way to fix it is to work it out in the culture. To that
end, I have some small observations to mull alongside the eggnog.
While it’s absolutely true that there are sincere and
committed Christophobes and joyless atheistic boobs out there, one of the major
culprits is capitalism itself. I like capitalism — a lot. Heck, the best
Christmas present I could get would be a Scrooge-like conversion on the part of
the president after a visit from the Ghost of Socialism Past. But the downside
of capitalism is that it will, eventually, encourage the commercialization of
everything sacred. For instance, there’s an online “dating” company dedicated
entirely to facilitating adultery. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that a holiday
symbolized by a man who gives presents would be exploited. That doesn’t mean we
have to surrender to the trend, but we should recognize all of the trend’s
sources, not just the convenient ones.
On a different note, the supposed champions of making
Christmas more “inclusive” should at least ponder the irony that they are being
intolerant. If you take offense when someone says “Merry Christmas,” you, quite
simply, are the jerk.
And for the atheists who see “winter solstice” as some kind
of victory, you might consider the fact that what you’re doing is clearing the
field not for glorious logic (which ain’t so glorious Christmas morning — socks
are a logical gift), but a rank, petty, and vastly more commercialized paganism
that lacks anything like the intellectual and moral rigor of Christianity”. - Jonah
Goldberg (1)
‘Christmas is out of sync with the times. Christmas cards,
shopping for loved ones, wrapping presents, dressing up the kids to see Santa,
going to Christmas Eve church services—one by one, the time to do them has gone
to wherever the time for everything else has gone. The Higgs boson may solve
the mysteries of the universe, but it won’t give us one more minute daily to
accomplish Christmas.
People talk all the time now about time compression.
Yesterday it was Dec. 1; the next day it’s Dec. 15. These days time doesn’t
fly. It barely exists. In such a world, Christmas gets squished. We may be a
few years away from when people just skip Christmas. Or phone the whole thing
in.
A few years ago, online shopping and e-cards were merely a
supplement to the ancient traditions of selecting and buying a gift across a
counter from a real person, or signing and addressing each Christmas card.
Truth is that in a solid Sunday afternoon spent pounding the keys, you can do
Christmas for anyone able to receive a $10 gift delivered overnight for $16. A
wry events website called “The Rundown” tagged the new spirit in a post this
week: “E-gifts that at least look like you thought about it.” ‘
“Christmas has become just one more item on the never-ending
to-do list”. – Daniel Henninger (2)
Notes:
(1)
Santa's not pagan, Jonah Goldberg. American
Enterprise Institute, 12/23/2011
http://www.aei.org/article/society-and-culture/santas-not-pagan/
(2)
No Time for Christmas, Daniel Henninger, The
Wall Street Journal, 12/22/2011
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