Biblical scholar Morton Smith (now deceased) has a book out called Jesus the Magician, in which he compiles evidence from ancient sources that some people did view Jesus as a magician.
I, personally, don’t give a wet slap about Jesus. Not even a little bit. That being said, I do celebrate Christmas. Hell, I’ve had Jewish friends that I exchanged gifts with regularly.
For me, Christmas in America stopped being a religious holiday a long, long time ago. And I know I’m not the only one who thinks that.
-Joe
To me it looks like two penises (with scrotums) back-to-back.
They were called the Expos(e) after all. Its right there in the team name.
It seems like you’re trying to contradict me here, but I don’t know what I posted that you actually disagree with or what your point is.
You’re certainly not the only one, but not everyone in the US feels that Christmas has zero religious significance. The holiday does also carry some cultural weight for purely traditional reasons. My point was that there is at least one real-world example of a culture that observes Christmas with parties and gift-giving even though the holiday is of no cultural, historic, or religious significance to the vast majority of the population. Christmas didn’t *stop *being a religious holiday in Japan, because it was never widely observed as a religious holiday at all.
We’re told so little about wizard Christmas in the Harry Potter series that I can see at least three plausible explanations for why wizards celebrate the day:
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Jesus Christ is an important religious figure to wizards, or at least was in the past. Christmas is a traditional, semi-religious holiday. It may have started out as entirely religious, but that does not seem to be the case now. Non-Christian or only nominally Christian wizards probably participate in Christmas parties and gift-giving.
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Jesus Christ is or was an important historic figure to wizards, perhaps comparable to Martin Luther King, Jr. in the US. Christmas is a traditional, secular holiday.
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Jesus Christ has never been a figure of any particular importance to wizards. (Pureblood wizards, at least – some Muggle-borns raised in Christian households may fall under #1 above.) Christmas is a relatively recent, secular holiday that was introduced to wizard culture by Muggle-born wizard children. This happened some time after Christmas started to be observed as more a family holiday than a religious one in the West, so probably no earlier than the mid 19th century.
- J. K. Rowling didn’t care about the consistency of wizard society at all. She never bothered to think through the question of the ways that it differs from muggle British society. She just put anything into the books that felt offhand right to her.
Or 4) Christmas is a mid-winter festival that pre-dates christianity? The religion was tacked on to an existing festival. There’s a good agrument to be made that since spells are in some form of latin, wizarding goes back to at least Roman times and they could trace their festivals back to the source, while muggle influences would bring across the modern trappings of Santa etc.
Or what **WW **said.
Isn’t Christmas in the UK not such a big deal? I seem to remember some UK posters on the SDMB complaining about how retailers in the UK are forcefully trying to make Christmas as big a deal there as it is in the USA.
-Joe
Nah, there’s No Such Thing As Wizard Jesus.
As far as I know, Rowling never gives us any reason to believe that the wizard world had any special knowledge about the existence or nature of Jesus, or of God, that was unavailable to muggle society.
Right. Rowling’s world is a Fantasy Kitchen Sink, and I don’t think she carefully planned out all the historical, religious, and cultural details of her world and how they all fit together.
No, it’s a pretty big deal. I mean, even in Narnia, they mention that it is always winter…but never Christmas and that was nearly 60 years ago.
I don’t think that Narnia would really count - I mean, those books are about as Christ-heavy as Left Behind books…
-Joe
Well, yeah, but even personally, I’ve seen that Christmas is a big deal in the UK.
Why would they have Christmas? Shouldn’t they celebrate Aslanmas instead?
I think the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was the most kiddie-oriented of the series (and was published first, wasn’t it?) Sort of analogous to The Hobbit vs. LOTR. So maybe some inconsistencies can be overlooked.
Even so, though, Narnia’s “Adam” was a Victorian London cabbie named Frank, so even within the Narnia universe one can imagine some cultural crossover from our world.
That’s one of the worst logos I’ve ever seen. Almost as bad as the 2012 Olympics logo.
I can’t believe I’ve not run across that one before.
Hey! I just realized that the Dominos Pizza logo is a domino.
Damn, I’m slow.