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Joe Fitzgerald's house Jew
By adamg on Wed, 12/09/2009 - 9:25am
It just wouldn't be Christmas without Joe Fitzgerald and his annual column about the one Jewish woman in Brighton who loves Christmas (past examples).
Jonathan Kamens explains why Fitzgerald and Irina Kotiniuc need to stop hocking about how Christianity is under assault in the Boston area and the U.S.
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Comments
Fitzgerald is a fool
One can forgive Irina, given her history. Her fear of religious persecution leads her to see it where it isn't. Fitzgerald has no such excuse. He is simply a fool.
Those who decry the "War on Christmas" are using the alarm itself to marginalize non-Christians. There's no such war. Wreathes and trees abound. Carolers, and mistletoe, and Salvation Army bells, and Santa suits, and angels on snowflakes are *everywhere*.
Majorities aren't persecuted. They're in charge.
CP
I couldn't have said it better myself
:o)
Those Things Are Not What Christmas Is About
Saying that wreathes and carolers and mistletoe and Santas are what Christmas is about is akin to saying that Chanukah is about dreidels or that Passover is about matzah. Those things are trappings of the season; fun perhaps, or maybe even seen as indispensable accoutrement by some, but not what it is about. What Christmas is truly about is the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ. And that, for better or worse, is lesser now than it once was in public spaces (and, from what I can divine, what Fitzgerald and others decry.)
I won't start arguing the propriety of having religious displays in public places. If somebody else wants to do that, go for it. I'm not up for a rehash of every old canard that will be dragged out of the mothballs. However, if you're going to discuss something, and call someone a fool while doing so, then you would probably be better off understanding the terms of the argument.
Suldog
http://jimsuldog.blogspot.com
Failing to endorse one
Failing to endorse one religion over another is not the same as waging war on it.
I think maybe you didn't read the column
Suldog,
Fitzgerald wrote about "ornaments, lights, and trees." I didn't see anything about Jesus.
If you think Christmas is too much about decorations now, and not enough about Jesus, I won't argue the point. It's not my holiday.
But there's no War on Christmas. And, as far as I know, there's no War on Jesus either.
CP
War? No. Marginalization? Yes.
And I say, good for us. There are a lot of storybooks out there that people mindlessly accept as reality. Not a single one of them needs to be considered over any other. Yet, if we want to call our winter celebration "Christmas" and do it without necessarily referring to Christianity's particular myth, then more power to us too. If we *don't* want to call it "Christmas" and just say "Happy Holidays" to be more inclusive, then more power to us as well.
If Christianity wanted a lockdown on their IP, they should have trademarked the word. Kleenex gets to complain if anyone else's tissues are called Kleenex. Christians don't get the same claim to this season any more. But thanks for popularizing it. The idea of a year-ending party where family gets together and exchanges gifts with a little pageantry and lights is a good one. So, here I am, an atheist at Christmas time, and I couldn't be happier. Too bad the whiners can't enjoy the season on their own too...or maybe they enjoy it by whining and worrying. More power to them, I guess.
And in the meantime, be grateful you don't live in NC
Critics of Cecil Bothwell cite N.C. bar to atheists
And, yes, that's in our past
Massachusetts, of course, started out as a theocracy. But look what was in the original state constitution, enacted in 1780 (Article III, to be exact):
See, I disagree
I don't mind Happy Holidays one bit. Hell, when I worked retail, I never knew what my customer celebrated, so "Happy Holidays" works just as well as "Have a good end-of-year celebration, whatever you celebrate."
If I knew the customer, it was a Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, whatever (never knew anyone to celebrate Kwanzaa, sorry, just never came up).
On the flip side, I think that the concept of Holiday Trees are stupid. It's a frickin' Christmas Tree. You know what would be nice? Menorahs around the city. You're telling me that our Mayor wouldn't love to have even more photo ops around the city, greeting his citizens, by lighting the menorah on the first day of Chanukah? Hell, he could light a different menorah each night! That's eight neighborhoods!
Oh, wait. We have a public menorah.
Oh, hey, and surprise. We don't call it the Holiday Candelabrum.
Personally, I'd rather we embraced all the holidays, rather than boil it down to a Generic Happy Holiday that borrows heavily from the secular trappings of Christmas.
The "happy holidays" thing does kind of annoy me though
It isn't actually inclusive. It includes Christians and Jews in years when Chanukah falls around Christmas. It doesn't include all the others. Also, I've not once had anyone say it to me in a store around my religion's major holidays, when I *am* at the store for the purpose of preparing for holidays. They don't even say it when I go through the line at Shaw's with a cart full of Kosher-for-Passover items -- the one time it would actually be a relevant thing to say to me at a store. The people-who-think-there's-a-war-on-Christmas have bastardized the term "holidays" so that it means "actually only Christmas except that we think we're not allowed to say that word even though there's no reason we can't actually say it."
Please, Eeka
There are employers who will insist that their service personnel not say "Christmas" (or "Chanukah" or "Kwanzaa" or any other specific holiday identifier) when greeting or otherwise having interaction with a customer. You aren't seriously trying to tell us that isn't so, are you? For instance, in my own line of business - telephony applications - we sell "holiday music" for folks to play on their phones, not "Christmas music", even though the tunes most decidedly lean towards those inspired by, and written specifically for, Christmas.
And there is no grand cabal of Christians somewhere in the Midwest making up rules about what the word "holidays" should mean. If accepted usage has come to mean "the Christmas season" (which is nebulous and means one stretch of time to one person and a different stretch of time to another, and has no definite meaning concerning just what holidays, aside from Christmas, might be included during that stretch of time) then that's a matter of general public sentiment come to the fore, not some plot.
In other words, you don't see a war and I don't see a plot. Can't we all just chill and let everybody go about celebrating whatever they wish to celebrate without getting our respective panties in a knot? Sheesh.
Chanuka Sameach!
Suldog
http://jimsuldog.blogspot.com
I Did Read The Column, But I Understand The Confusion
Well, he quotes Irina concerning trees and such, but his main concern (from my reading) is "expressions of faith" being lesser. Perhaps we are reading the same words and gathering different meanings from them?
There is most certainly a much stronger affirmation of non-belief these days than there was, say, 20 or 30 years ago. One person calls such a thing - and the attendant actions of those who wish a lessening of religion's role in society - a "war", while another says it isn't. Well, it might not be a "war" by definition, but it certainly is a troubling situation to some of us. Whether the fault is our thin skins or the overly-aggressive nature of the other folks is sometimes going to remain a "he said, she said" sort of thing, I suppose.
Suldog
http://jimsuldog.blogspot.com
Season of Advent & The Twelve Days of Christmas
Suldog is close to the truth, but doesn't push far enough.
The roughly four weeks of Advent are a season that focuses on the Second Coming of Christ and on the Last Things: Death, Judgement, Heaven, and Hell. In the Episcopal Church the color of the season is a somber violet and the prayers for the four Sundays of Advent focus on the themes of casting away the works of darkness, the judgement of the living and the dead, the preaching of repentance, the warnings of the prophets, the purification of conscience, personal and corporate preparation for the Second Coming. (The focus of the Roman Catholic Church is similar, but I don't have their books to hand.)
The Western Church's annual preparation for the Second Coming of Christ is to return again to a contemplation of his humility at his first coming as an utterly helpless, squalling infant who sucked at the breast and whose diapers needed to be changed.
The orgy of commercialism and materialism of late November and December—all the trappings Fitzgerald gasses on about—have got fuck-all to do with preparation for Christ's Nativity.
The days of Advent ought to be a Christian preparation to render an account of our lives to him from whom no creature is hid, but all are naked and laid bare.
The few days between Advent IV and Christmas Eve are the time for all the preparations for the Twelve Days of Christmas (which stretch between Christmas Eve and the Feast of the Epiphany, 6 January).
Advent calls for a great deal of fasting and repentance, not Fitzgerald's festive, fundamentally anti-Christian, fairy tale of ornaments, lights, and trees.