Wasn’t that Eddie Murphy’s character in Beverly Hillsboro Cop?
I think we ought to just face the facts and shut the whole country down between Thanksgiving and New Years. Nothing seems to get done work-wise anyway. After that, we can start negotiations on whether or not to push the start date back to the Halloween!
Home for Purim is one my favorite movies!
When I started high school, I became really critical of the whole Christmas thing. It just seemed really hypocritical that, for fifty weeks of a year, the average American was hiding inside next to the Fallout Shelter door, fretting about every noise that could be a home-invasion slaughterer and alternately screaming “Nuke The Russians!” and “I’ll shoot you if you come near my basket of fruit!”
but then for the last two weeks of the year everyone was coming out to smile and offer a cheerful “Merry Christmas! :D” while at the same time spitting on the homeless guy in front of the discount store and knocking little old ladies’ wheelchairs over as part of their competitive dash to buy the Toy-of-the-Year for the grandson of their ninth cousine sixteen times removed. And for those two weeks they felt good about their lives?:dubious:
One of the reasons I was so happy to go to Japan for a year (to teach English) was that it meant I’d be able to get away from the Christmas Marketing Blitz (see above) between Thanksgiving and New Years Day. To my horror, the Japanese replaced the Six Weeks of Christmas with the Four Months of Winta Gifto Ken (Winter Gift Season) during which they incessantly played all those nauseating western Holiday Tunes in the stores and throughout the shopping district where my English school was located.
When I got back to The States, I started volunteering during Thanksgiving and Christmas, serving holiday dinners to homeless and impoverished families in order to give “The Holidays” a less commercial and more socially beneficial meaning in my life. It helps to rinse out the bitter taste that Americanized (Capitalized) holidays seem to leave behind.
This is largely because monotheism has as its first prescription a commandment to put their own belief system first-above-all-others if not just unyieldingly the-only-belief-allowed. The paradigm explains why there’s only one deity rather than a pantheon, and also prohibits recognition of any other paradigms. At the very least, most of the other systems lack such a prohibition and some are even quite willing to allow mixing of beliefs and personifications. A devout Buddhist would say you can be Buddhist and Christian if you wish; a devout Muslim would say you can’t be Muslim and anything else. The neo-fundamentalists also refuse to share space in our hearts.
This would be because the people who claim to be returning* to the fundamental practices and literal interpretations of Christianity are motivated by the First Commandment#, which they interpret to mean ‘don’t allow anyone else to appreciate, much less promote, any other belief system’ and, from a perspective that stays within such a paradigm, there’s no mis-guidance at all; it’s an all or nothing edict.
One year I saw in San Diego that someone had rented the space that normally showed “Jesus is…” and displayed their own, “Physics is the reason for the season.” That was refreshing!
For years I really loved Halloween, largely because it felt “counter-Christian” somehow. But at some point I realized most of the scary movies don’t strike home for me because I just don’t buy into any of the monotheist paradigm (borrowed from its Zoroastrian predecessor) of good and evil incarnations. Lack of any good or evil incarnations tends to obviate the ‘let the evil minions come out and play for one night of the year’ background of Halloween, as well.
–G!
*One cannot return to a place one has never been.
#And somehow they don’t recognize that as being the same thing motivating the Muslims they vilify, even though Muslims and Christians both fully acknowledge that they are sustaining that edict from the Hebrew Torah. Why, then, do people of Jewish heritage seem so relaxed about the matter?
If I were to give a closing remark on this whole thing, it would be that it’s a non-christian’s problem (or an unprincipled one’s.) It’s therefore my duty to pointedly ignore it.
Christmas is for children. If you have children in your lives, play it up as big as you like to entertain them. For those of us who do not it tends to get less of an emphasis.
However, what America celebrates at Thanksgiving, I find we in not-America transfer into Christmas; that is, a time for families to get together, have a big meal, and catch up on the past year, reflecting in, hopefully, a positive way. If that’s what you want out of it, and I certainly do, then all the accoutrements, the glitter and gifts and what-have-you, have less importance.
Also, down here where it’s summer makes the ttraditional wintery theme of Christmas a very weird juxtaposition.
I’m Jewish and even I never said Happy Holidays and not meant Christmas as one of those Holidays. I never said it as a way to exclude Christmas; I have always said it as a short hand to include Thanksgiving and New Years. I don’t know why conservatives love to play the victim but that’s all this War on Christmas nonsense is.
It was Philadelphia and West Side Story was popular.
Nah, I love Halloween because it has to be the goofiest holiday invented. There are just so, so many ridiculous things about the holiday it’s amazing. Hocus Pocus is a work of art.