THE WART[s] ON CHRISTMAS

Tired of all the yawping about taking Christ out of Xmas? Tired of people--and you know who they are--who make a living out of pretending that there's a war on Xmas?  

Yeah.  

Me too.

Actually, there is no WAR ON CHRISTMAS.  The Christmas holiday season starts earlier and earlier each year, lapping over other traditional American holidays, like Halloween and Thanksgiving.  And this country is absolutely drenched in everything Christmas starting right after the 4th of July.

The complainers who claim there's a war on Xmas aren't really whining about not having enough Christmas, they're really complaining about people not being more religious about Christmas.  But the ones responsible for that are not the non-religious--(actually, the Christians stole the idea of celebrating the winter solstice and making it into the birthday for Jesus from pagans.) 

No.  The people most responsible for making Christmas into the biggest capitalist celebration of the calendar year are, well, they're the good ole all American apple pie, Mom, and flag waving corporations.  They're the ones who start the selling of stuff right after Labor Day and they keep it going right through the Baby Jesus's non-birthday. (According to Biblical scholars, Jesus was born in the spring.)

So all of this forced commercialism on what was originally a pagan celebration around the Winter Solstice is, to me, a WART on Xmas, not a WAR on Xmas.

A wart is an unpleasant growth on something.  Usually a hand or foot or other part of a human's or other animal's body [See Warthog.]  So we usually associate it with something unattractive.

I now associate the Christmas season with a lot of unattractive, annoying corporate, not family, traditions. When I was a kid, the Xmas season wasn't like that.  We actually made it through Thanksgiving without hearing a Xmas song or seeing a Xmas decoration in the neighborhood until at least the second week in December.  We didn't put our pagan-inspired tree up until the week before Xmas.  And we didn't feel like choking the person responsible for playing Christmas music because he/she imposed it on us in November. The Christmas songs were fun for the two weeks we endured them.  But because Xmas is the biggest selling season for corporations, we're exploited and hounded to get into the Xmas spirit so we'll feel all fuzzy and warm inside while spending a lot of money on a lot of cheap Chinese-made stuff.

I prefer the Xmas of my youth when we exchanged one present each, when we put food or sweets in our stockings, and we celebrated the Feast of the Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve, while our aunts and uncles played our favorite Xmas songs on the piano, violin, and guitar.



Here's my list of  what has become the WARTS ON XMAS:

1) Black Friday

2) Being forced to listen to "What a bright time, it's the right time to rock the night away," starting on November 1 in my local CVS.  And other Xmas ditties over and over and over and over in every store I walk into.

3) The teevee adverts on children's toys.  Children's ugly made-in-China plastic toys.

4) Salvation Army ringers.  I heard them in October outside of my local Whole Foods.

5) Gigantic plastic blow-up reindeer, Santas, snowmen, and creches on sad little lawns in suburbia.

6)  Colored lights -- not the kind that Stanley Kowalski told Stella about in "A Street Car Named Desire," the colored, flashing lights that are festooned on houses so that they look like nightmarish casinos.

7) Fake Christmas trees (unless you have allergies.)  Why not enjoy the smell of pine in your home--one of the nicest things about the season.

8) Fake snow

9) Teevee specials with awful music and singing.

10)  Fruitcake.  (Except the one a friend from South Africa made me one year--it was the best I'd ever tasted in my life.)

11)  Commercially baked Xmas cookies from the supermarkets

12)  Christmas "letters" included in cards bragging about all your families' achievements.

13)  Putting up Xmas decorations on December 1.

14) Shopping malls.

15) Office parties.

16) "I want, I want, I want!"

17)  FAUX NOOZ telling their viewers that saying "Happy Holidays," is leaving Christ out of Xmas.

17) FAUX NOOZ, Bill O'Reilly, and their viewers telling me there's a "War on Christmas."

18)  There isn't.

Feel free to add more.



There's no war on Christmas, there are only WARTS on Christmas, and that's because the corporatists need to make as much money as possible in this limited period of time.  That means we have to endure annoying inducements to buy, buy, buy.

I was raised a Catholic.  I am no longer a believer, but I do enjoy the pagan tradition of putting up a tree and celebrating the winter solstice.  

Jesus was not born in the winter. Shepherds did not keep watch over their flocks by night in the fields in winter.  But no one seems to mind that part of the story's contradiction.  

Why people who believe in the Christmas story participate in making it into a wart on the season is a mystery to me.


Happy Holidays and Festivus for the rest of us!