(credit: Carol M. Highsmith, via Wikimedia Commons)  

                                        Further Thoughts On Christmas

Once again, I’m feeling a need to write about my pet peeve at Christmas so here goes. One old guy’s rant at postmodernism. Again.

For the past several years, as we approached Christmas, I have published a post here that explained my view regarding this holiday, the second most celebrated in the world. (The most celebrated is New Year’s Day.) My message is always: celebrate the ideals behind the day; then you can stand the nonsense and even feel, profoundly, the real spirit of Christmas.

I don’t think of myself as a Christian because I don’t believe Jesus was divine, or more accurately, I believe he had a light in his thinking that all of us have in some degree, though his was the greatest of all so far. But he was still a man, human, and I don’t pray to him. That is polytheism. For deep reasons, too many to explain in this post, I don’t trust any form of polytheism.

On the other hand, I like his message of love for all humans and of reducing our concern for material things. Let Caesar people have what’s theirs. Money and the things money can buy. We have more profound concerns in daily life. Work. Love.

That message of love and humility is what I believe in celebrating. Others had said it before, but Jesus, by the drama of his life and death, made it personal. That ideal is worth celebrating. The rest of modern Christmas is tinsel show.

However, I’m not patient with folk who get offended by the greeting, “Merry Christmas”. I understand their distaste.  Throughout history, a lot of cruelty and injustice has been perpetrated in Jesus’ name by various Christian entities: nations, churches, charities, and others. From the earliest days of Christianity, till now. I’m well aware of it.

My reply to those charges has remained pretty much the same over the years. In the first and most obvious place, none of that was Jesus’ fault. He asked his followers to practice humility and compassion – at levels almost unheard of in his times – to all other humans, not just members of their ingroup. That belief and the practices it entails are what we celebrate at Christmas, not the support some churches gave to colonialism, slavery, the Inquisition, or the Crusades. The sins of Christianity’s past are sins of people, not Jesus. Not Christmas.

In the second place, all of the other faiths of the world have had their glaring errors, including scientism itself, which is the philosophy that the most heated critics of Christmas often recommend to us. There have been too many atrocities committed by people who claimed their loyalty was to science for any serious person to ever hold science up as our moral guide. Both Stalin and Hitler had their “sciences”. Even Heisenberg failed morally in those times.

But there is more to my distaste for the Christmas bashers than that. There is something deeper going on here.  

In the largest, global view of all humans, we see that we have to have something. Each of us has to have some code of behavior in our heads to even live together, go to work, smile at the drugstore clerk, and take out the trash. A human with no code of behavior in her head is catatonic: she sits and stares and drools.

You are weighing and choosing your actions this second. Your code is personal, yes, and very complex, yes, but it must be in there. If you’re reading this, you aren’t catatonic. Those who tell us that we should give up on the idea of moral codes altogether are spouting drivel. Postmodernist kaka.

There are major variations in codes of acceptable behavior between cultures and even between individuals within any given culture in the world this very moment. But there are enough areas of overlap between citizens in Canada, for example, for us to be able to live together, work, produce goods and services, get paid, make babies, raise them, and keep on keeping on.

I will repeat my point here to be clear: we all – but for the psychopaths and the catatonics – have a behavior code of some sort installed as a major app in our brains. We have beliefs about right and wrong, and they guide us as we make choices and act every minute of every day. If we didn’t,  we couldn’t. All of those abstractions together – for those who like cyber terms – are our software.

The thought that scares me about the critics of Christmas is a two pronged fear. In the first place, they seem to be exhorting the rest of us to drop all of our connections to all past moral codes. This is a central point for postmodernists, and it sounds glibly appealing. But I wonder what they offer to replace those codes, and more specifically, for this present season, the ideals behind the Christmas greeting. They, we, all of us, can’t get by on no values, beliefs, ideals, or moral code of any kind. Then, since we must have something in place in our heads in order to run our lives, I repeat: what do they suggest?

Whether they want to admit it or not, most of the cynics who sneer at Christmas are riding on the customs and values of the Judeo-Christian system of believing and behaving. We, in the West, are the current exponents of that movement in world history. For the most part, we aren’t Oriental, American indigenous, or African in our beliefs, values, and world views. And yes, our system of believing is stuffed with flaws and needs serious updating. But to say we must just drop even the idea of having such things as beliefs, ethics, or values from our thinking is ridiculous. No one chooses catatonia.

So what do the postmodernists suggest if we drop entirely the traditional ways of thought and behavior, including, more specifically for this season, all mention of Jesus’ ideals at Christmas?

What has been ensuing in the wake of that cynicism in my lifetime (75 years) is not the world of John Lennon’s “Imagine”. What we’re getting is much clearer than that if we have the honest eyes to really look: a new, modern saint who is even called “Saint”. Dressed in white and red. He smiles as he tells all, including the youngest of kids, his simple creed: buy stuff. More and more stuff. Trees, ornaments, presents, food, booze, pills. Stuff will make you happy.  

My grandkids all get gift certificates. I encourage them to buy books. Or food stuffs, which have biodegradable consequences. But I tell all nine of them, as calmly as I can: “Ask every item you see in every store and on every website: ‘Hello, little item! How long till you’re in the landfill?’”

In short what I’m saying is that there’s a whole conversation here the Christmas critics aren’t having because, I believe, they don’t want to. If we take all beliefs and values out of our culture – including Jesus’ beliefs in loving and respecting our fellow humans and turning away from materialism – which are the things Christmas is about – then, what will we replace those beliefs with? Santa!??

Merry Christmas. You didn’t hear it here first, but you did hear it here. Merry Christmas. Peace on earth. Good will toward all the human family. And I exhort you: ignore the material junk. That’s the whole point. It’s junk. Christmas is about something else entirely. Merry Christmas from one old guy in Canada.

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