Warning: This may be a multi-part post…or not.
Disclaimer: As with everything on this blog, the views expressed here are my own if you disagree that’s fine, just like its fine for these thoughts and opinions to be mine.
There’s no denying that it’s officially the holiday season here in the USA. It’s been creeping up on us for months but now the full court press is on. Nearly every commercial is holiday themed; wait, why am I saying holiday themed? Nothing is “HOLIDAY” themed, they are all CHRISTMAS themed.
The American Atheists Organization(http://atheists.org/atheism/Christmas) put up a billboard outside the Lincoln Tunnel, the major entry to New York City from New Jersey. It went up the day before Thanksgiving, the “official” holiday, ummm, Christmas season kick-off. The image is a familiar one, three wise men guided by a star to a nativity scene, the message is much different, “You KNOW it’s a Myth, this season, celebrate reason”. I admit that I haven’t heard much press about this just yet but I can’t imagine it will exist there without scandal for the next four weeks. If it does then there are more reasonable people out there than I’ve thought possible. For years I’ve been inundated with billboards and bumper stickers telling us to “Put Christ back in Christmas” which is really far more offensive than what the American Atheists are putting out there.
Christians had to put Christ into Christmas in the first place. Yule or Yuletide (sorry, I just took a break to do a holiday movie trivia quiz online) was a celebration in the northern hemisphere with some pagan and cultural roots. There’re plenty of sources for info about the various traditions out there on the internet and because this isn’t a scholarly paper I’m not gonna hunt down references, you’ll just have to take my word for it and do your own damn research.
Yuletide was a big ol’ feast. The countries that celebrated it, places like Norway, Sweden and other cold places up north killed the necessary livestock for their winter meals and generally partied hard to get through their harsh and DARK winters. Evergreen trees were common in the forests of the Nordic and Germanic countries and so was darkness. That said, you’ve got forests of trees that never lose their greenery in winter and you have something that can symbolize endless life and re-birth…not necessarily the physical re-birth of a religious savior but the re-birth of more basic stuff…like plants which happens in the spring and plants equal food which equals LIFE. So if you light up those evergreen trees with some candles you bring light to the darkness (I’ve been up in those countries…it is DARK this time of year) combined you have a symbol that life will eventually return to the earth in the form of spring and also light will return as the seasons change. Now all you Christian folks are welcome to co-opt that stuff for your own needs but let’s not tout putting Christ BACK in Christmas because I’ll be responding by saying let’s put Yule back in ol’ Yuletide.
The twelve days of Christmas, that would be December 25th to January 6th, oh yes it is. I did my research on this many years ago because my birthday happens to be twelve days before Christmas and people would make a point of telling me I was the first gift of the twelve days of Christmas, I had to know so I looked it up (long before the days of the internet I might add). They were wrong. Yule straddles the end of December and the beginning of January and the festival would last twelve days generally the darkest days of the year. Again our Christian buddies liked it so they decided to attach their own meaning to it, January 6th is often referred to as Little Christmas or Epiphany. The myth is something about it being the day the Magi reached the baby Jesus in the manger which works quite nicely to marry up Christian myth with pagan traditions and end all that overeating and overdrinking and hunker down to get through the remainder of the cold, dark winter months.
You get the picture, Christianity was spreading but they needed to sell themselves to the masses and the best way to do it was to glom onto an existing celebration.
Flash forward lo these many years and the whole mess has turned into, well, a whole mess. I have to wonder if those ol’ Yule feasts were also fraught with family drama the way today’s are. They must’ve been, right? I mean nothing says family drama like downing a few too many pints of mead?
A recent article I accessed through CNN.com bashed Christmas TV ads like Lexus and DeBeers because of the sheer extravagance of it all. I don’t know a single person in my half century + on planet earth that has ever walked outside Christmas morning to see a shiny new luxury car in their driveway with a big red bow on top. I don’t even know someone that has walked outside to see a used Chevy in their driveway on Christmas morning no less a friggin’ Lexus but there it is, every year, this ridiculous commercial put out there to make all other gifts seem pale and inadequate. I don’t even know what I’d do if I walked out and saw a new Lexus in my driveway. Honestly, if we had enough money to do that wouldn’t I want to go with hubby and pick it out myself?
The DeBeers diamond commercial was also specifically razzed and as one of the commenters pointed out, getting engaged on Christmas is NOT all that original of an idea so DeBeers is just pushing the buttons on the least creative members of the male population. Kay Jewelers can get lumped in there for the same lack of originality. I saw a commercial just last night for some other diamond ring that was a specific style, an endless knot or something like that. Now here’s my thoughts on that…do you really want an engagement ring that anyone else could also have? Seriously, don’t you want your engagement ring to show some small degree of originality and not be a mass-produced style from a chain jewelry store?
The Folgers coffee commercials make me crazy (and not in a good way). To be honest that sister and brother creep me out a bit if ya know what I mean. She’s just a tad too excited to see him and she greets him in that weird way, “SISTAH?” I don’t get it, she’s the sister, is she reminding him who she is? She says it in this weird questioning way that is just odd. I also don’t know why the brother is traveling from West Africa, where did they get THAT from? Were they just trying to find some faraway exotic place to toss into the commercial?
Any commercial with the lovely Budweiser Clydesdales works for me. Love to see them prancing through fields of snow with the jolly sound of jingle bells in the background. I never get tired of seeing those. I’m not sure I understand the Tommy Hilfiger commercials and I don’t think they even advertise most of the year except for Christmas but there they are bounding out of some artsy-sporty vehicle in a field somewhere dressed in artsy-sporty Hilfiger clothes, pointless.
I can’t call this anything other than the Christmas season…not because I want it that way but because the commercials I’m talking about either flat out pander to Christmas or they imply Christmas so strongly that it’d be foolish of me to pretend that they’re holiday commercials. There are the Pillsbury commercials with the slice and bake Christmas cookies or the crescent rolls, there are the 3M commercials for the various tape and wrapping products. I have to give 3M credit for doing really excellent line extensions for their products. They now have a little tape dispenser that goes on your wrist and doles out precut pieces of tape to make gift wrapping easier, NEAT. They have those hanger things that are temporary and don’t leave marks on your walls, doors or mantels, again, NEAT. They have found a way to take some truly boring products and made them into something pretty useful to serve Christmas decorating needs. Kudos to their development and marketing departments (seriously, no sarcasm here, I love what they’ve done with their product line).
I’ve touched on the American Atheists (and in case you were in any way confused…I’m 100% in favor of what they’ve done with that billboard), they tout reason and they actually seem to mean it. Here’s how I feel, if you derive some sense of comfort or community by believing in a specific deity and worshiping something in a specific way then I say “go for it” with the caveat to not bother me with it. Don’t try to make me follow what you believe and please be kind and respectful to me and others who choose not to believe what you believe.
Now that I’ve put that out there I have to say that there are definitely some serious extremists who just won’t do that, who won’t play nice in this big ol’ sandbox known as earth. The American Family Association is one of them (http://action.afa.net/ ). They compiled a list of “naughty or nice” retailers, what, you may be wondering makes them naughty or nice? I was surprised to find out that what made a retailer naughty or nice was whether they said "Merry Christmas” or “Happy Holidays”! Really? How FUCKING INTOLERANT; how completely EXclusionary. They think that if they have a holiday shop with ornaments and other decorations that it MUST be called a Christmas shop not a holiday shop! Why? What if they include in that area some Mennorahs and dreidls? What if you celebrate yuletide and put up a tree and decorations in honor of that? Nope according to the AFA it’s Christmas and nothing else. It’s because of folks like this that my Atheist buddies (of which I would say I am one) feel compelled to put up a billboard outside the Lincoln Tunnel pointing out that IT’S A MYTH. It may be a lovely myth. It may bring comfort and joy to millions of people, I get that. But please, please, please don’t shove your myth down my throat along with the turkey and cranberry sauce. Hell, Harry Potter is a myth too but the books are a lot easier to read.
NEXT UP: Holiday entertainment
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