Nice rant. Most of these thoughts have occured to me from time to time, but …
We need Christmas or Saturnalia or the Solstice Feast or whatever you like to celebrate at the beginning of winter. It’s (for much of the northern hemisphere) a cold, dark, dreary season. It was traditionally a way to get together with the rest of the community, pool resources (gifts), and use up the rest of the summer harvest before it spoiled (feast). What’s wrong is that we have largely forgotten “the reason for the season”, and it’s not to celebrate the birth of the Christian icon. As pointed out earlier, the early Christians co-opted the existing holiday for themselves. Technically, “Christmas” is about “Christ”. The reason for a holiday this time of year is not, and pre-dates Christ by many thousands of years. So celebrating at Christmas by non-Christians is not hypocritical, Christians saying that non-Christians shouldn’t is.
By the way, the gifts you mentioned sound perfectly appropriate and meaningful. People who judge a gift by it’s cost don’t know the meaning of “value”.
On one point, I agree with you emphatically. Anyone who chooses to subject themselves to the mall on the day after Thanksgiving is demonstrably insane. So you were right not to go shopping with your aunt, she may be dangerous .
I hate christmas for many of the same reasons the OP does. I don’t personally care that many people have “made it their own” and substituted santa for Jesus. What drives me nuts is the OPs reason #s 1 and 2.
In August, in Texas before I came back home, the damn Walmart had a huge display of Christmas decorations and trees. Most of the Alaskan stores, once I got home in the beginning of September managed some semblance of self control until just prior to Halloween. Two weeks before Halloween, there are all kinds of xmaas displays all over.
It’s the “cram it down your throat, you MUST make this a big deal” aspect of it that I hate, in addition to others. Then, there are the Old Navy commercials. They strongly suggest that there’s something wrong with people who don’t get gifts for everyone in the damn world.
And that is my MAIN problem with Christmas as it’s become. It’s just a huge guilt fest dressed up in red and green. It’s one thing to start gradually working in some xmas songs here and there, but the very NANOsecond after Halloween, we’ve suddenly got a dedicated xmas song radio station, and half the office buildings in town have their hallway muzak set to it.
Look what ever happened to KISS? Keep it simple stupid? This run to the gold, jack up your credit cards and ruin your credit so that you can “keep up with the Joneses” and so on.
I’ve already been accused of being a Scrooge because I don’t want to watch Christmas movies or put up a Christmas Tree or listen to Christmas movies on THANKSGIVING!
I used to like Christmas a lot more until I got completely sick of being surronded by it for a FUCKING MONTH. It’s like everything you eat being coated in Suger. It may be fun for a week, but for a month you’re completely and utterly sick of it.
Can’t we just go back to Christmas being a One day or maybe a one week a year thing?
Yeah, I think we should focus on the first paragraph of the OP: she was accused of being a Grinch because she didn’t want to spend the day after Thanksgiving at the mall spending money.I don’t want to spend the day after … uh… Remembrance Day… at the mall. I can’t think of a circumstance in which I would want to spend the day at the mall.
“Excuse me, do you have Jewish New Year cards?”
“Oh, I’m sorry! We don’t get our New Year’s cards in until November. But we’ll be getting Jewish Christmas cards in then too.”
I get accused of being a Grinch every year by CrazyCatLady because I don’t like to put up the tree or the Christmas decorations until a couple of weeks before Christmas, rather than the day after Thanksgiving. It drives me completely up the wall when she does it, and sucks out a lot of my holiday spirit, but she does it anyway.
Every year I point out that if she weren’t such a Grinch, she’d want to put it up in September. Or hell, why take it down at all? A real non-Grinch would just leave the damn tree up all year, by that logic. She never has much of an answer.
Just to be clear, it’s the accusations of Grinchyness that infuriate me and discourage my holiday spirit, not the actual Christmas decorations going up so early. I don’t really mind the early decorations, as long as I don’t have to hear what an awful human being I am for thinking that the Christmas season loses meaning when it is stretched too thin.
I like Christmas. I like the music, the smell of pine, getting together with my family, and all the yummy home-cooked food! That said, it started being a pain for a while. The pressure of buying gifts for everyone and worrying about “if I spend $79.99 on this brother, I have to find something that costs as much for my other brother or it will look bad” got to be too much.
My family started enjoying Christmas a lot more when we set a $25 limit on gifts. I’ve found I buy more meaningful gifts when I have to think about what’s right for the person (and under $25) rather than just “well, this $79.99 sweater isn’t really special, but it’s a top brand from a nice store so it will do.” Last year, my mother got me a print that looked exactly like something from a favorite book of my childhood. That was my best gift ever. I look at it hanging on my wall and remember mom reading my favorite book to me whenever I was feeling sick or had a difficult day. Plus, for $25 I don’t really go to the mall or WalMart. I find special things in little out of the way shops or book stores. It’s a lot more fun shopping that way.
When we get together, we don’t spend hours engaged in gluttenous holiday gift grabbing. And we don’t worry about the January bills. Instead we’re able to focus on how nice it is to see each other and engage in our family traditions. “Giving” is still an important part of the holiday for us, but “spending” isn’t. It’s more about finding something that shows you know and care about this person than “I plunked down a lot of money on you this year.”
Now if I could just get a ban on carols and decorations until after Thanksgiving, I’d be happy. Hey, even I get sick of the stuff if I’ve heard and seen it since October!
Ah, yes, it’s not really Christmas-time until we have the annual Anti-Commercialism Rant ™. (Although I like the half-hour Peanuts special on the topic far better as it manages to be entertaining without being sanctimonious, unlike the OP.)
It’s a hazardous journey from ‘I don’t want to visit the mall the day after Thanksgiving and my aunt is on my case about it’ to ‘anyone who gives commercially-made gifts to their family is buying love’ but our OP made it in one piece. Her reasoning is flawed, and the whole thing boils down to something that sounds suspiciously like ‘I can’t afford nice gifts for my family this year and it makes me feel bad so I’ll just show disdain for the whole thing and that way no one will suspect’ but whatever floats her boat is fine by me.
I’d give it a 4.5, the extra .5 being for the ‘big, gaping, oozing pustules’ section, which nearly made me lose my breakfast.
Heh. My MIL just called to summon my husband to her house to put up her Christmas tree! We are venturing out to Costco to buy a tree today, but I’m not putting it up for a couple more weeks (it’s fake- hubby is allergic).
How about a good combination holiday? My best friend in college was Reform & I am Methodist (wait, isn’t that practically the same thing? ), and she didn’t have anyone to spend most holidays with, so we created some combination holidays, like HannaChristmas and EastOver. It worked very well, because the point was getting together with loved ones and having a good time.
Eh, I don’t like the hideous commercialism anymore than the next person, but life is waaaaaay too short to have an aneurysm about it.
As a vegetarian, I’ve learned that telling people how horrible they are for eating animals won’t change any minds - in fact, often you’ll just get them defensive and make them even less likely to consider your message.
Same thing with rants about Christmas. Christians who are in the “it’s about Jesus!” shrieking/preaching camp don’t change the minds of the less-devout Christians or the non-Christians who run around madly buying presents. Materialists who simply must get the latest hyped crap to show they “care” about their friends and family don’t change the minds of others when they puff about how “good” they are.
Sure, Christians co-opted Saturnalia - in order to allow them to celebrate without prosecution. The Romans probably co-opted some predecessor to Saturnalia - hell, they adopted most of the gods of regions they conquered in order to assimilate the populace better. (“Ah, well, your moon goddess? See, that’s Diana…”)
Co-opt Christmas. Show by example, not by harsh words, what this time of year means to you. If you think the message is about real love and caring, why do you show it as spite and snobbery in your words?
If Christians co-opted pagan rituals, they did it after the time which I’ve studied. Which goes up to about 500 CE.
No, Christmas is not Saturnalia, or Yule, or the Sostice. Those are all Dec. 21. You might notice a four-day difference there. The only argument that could be made about the placing of Jesus’ birthday is that it was ‘The day of the Unconquered Sun’ which may or may not have been some sort of Mithraic holiday.
I don’t doubt that some things came to be associated with Christmas that were not Christian, and were probably folk traditions, like trees, mistletoe etc. But I sincerely doubt any of the church hierarchy approved of any of these things, much less deliberately incorporated them.
Dude. You’re just bitter because someone gave you a combo gift, aren’t you? No, wait! A birthday present wrapped IN CHRISTMAS PAPER. Even better! You wanted a birthday party but no one could come because they were out of town for the holidays.
This is just wrong. Christmas doesn’t have to be either/or. It can be about Jesus AND gifts.
For many Christians, we give gifts because it honors the loving act of giving. As in, “God so loved the world He gave his only begotten son…” So it actually is about gifts.
My problem with the gift-giving is that people go overboard with spending, either because they feel obligated to or because they’re just plain lazy to think of something cheaper but more meaningful. Also, I don’t like that kids often think it’s “gimme, gimme” season. But the act of gift-giving isn’t the cause of these problems.
Last year, I gave my sister a huge drawing (the size of a wall) of mine that I knew she liked. Let me tell you, the tears of joy she shed because of it was well worth the four years I spent doing it. That’s the kind of emotion Christmas is about.
I also think Christmas can mean different things to different people. For one thing, it’s full of innocent, wholesome fun. My parents are religious but they treat the holiday as a secular one. We did the “let’s leave cookies out for Santa” thing when I was little. It was fun. We make Christmas cookies and give them out as gifts. That’s fun. My parents still get a big-ass tree and do it up all pretty because it’s fun. It’s fun to put on the Temptations Christmas and Nat King Cole albums every year. It’s fun to drink egg nog and wrap presents late into the night. It’s fun to go driving around to look at Christmas decorations in the neighborhood. These are the kinds of things that–for me–Christmas is about. I won’t let the un-fun stuff–like the chaotic shopping–ruin what is fun.
It does make you a grinch if you won’t let others have their fun without displaying your disdain. There is no need to tell people they are celebrating the “wrong way”…that’s entirely too judgemental and wrong.
I’m tired of people thinking that starving, dying, and abused people have a colossul monopoly on pain. We all suffer from pain. A person who just lost their job has pain. A person who just found out their spouse has been unfaithful has pain. A person who just lost their beloved cat has pain. A person is stressed out by their job and family has pain. They have a roof over their head and food in their bellies, but they still have pain. And a thoughtful gift could lift their spirits.
Sure, I can send ten bucks to UNICEF to help a child I’ve never met eat. Or I can use that ten bucks to buy something special for someone I love…who maybe I don’t get to see but once a year. Maybe I’ll use that ten dollars to buy a necklace for a niece, and fifty years from now she’ll find it in a drawer and remember that her Auntie Monstro was thinking about her. Maybe fifty years from now, she’ll need to know that.
A friend on the board sent me a book. The book cost her some money. Money that she could have donated to church or to a charity, or used to start a massive petition to Do Something Big and Important. But instead, she decided to spend it on me, so that I–a person she doesn’t know–could feel better. Who are you to say that that isn’t something that matters? It matters to me! One day someone will do something nice for you, and you’ll be glad that they didn’t decide to pass you over for an anonymous kid in Bumfuckastan.
In some ways, you could be talking about my family. The tree is all ready up, my mother started asking for finalized wish lists in October, and even though I’m the only non-Christian in the group, Jesus most likely won’t even get an honorable mention on Dec. 25. You know what? We like it this way. Twice a year (Christmas and birthdays) we all go out and buy each other some of the things that we want and need. We get together in one place, eat lots of food, exchange gifts, and tell stories. I’m not seeing the horror in this practice.
We give with our hearts, worry about the starving and poor and live regular lives for the majority of the year. What’s wrong with taking a a couple of days to a month off and buying crap for your loved ones just because they want it? Yes, the money spent on junk could be spent helping people, but we could also spend our vacation money, or tuition fund, or bigger house funds helping people too. There’s nothing wrong with doing something nice for yourself and your close friends and family every once in awhile. If you want to give donations, or if you hate Christmas then fine. It was tacky for people that don’t like your beliefs and practices to look down on you and lecture, and it’s still tacky for you to do it to anyone else.
Must wash eyes and brain with bleach. Then I will sit in the corner with a marker writing “Must not click links again, EVER” on the wall. This will happen after I clean the hot chocolate I WAS drinking off the monitor, keyboard and the cat.
::shudder::
If you can’t think of a more apt reply than a direct link to the grossest sort of visual potty humor, Isla_Lund, then maybe you just aren’t cut out for this board. You’ve certainly been warned enought times. This is the first time I can remember when “stop crapping on the board” is so literal.
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