CSotD: Looking for the word
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Mike Peters could just as easily have used this on the political cartooning side of his work as in Mother Goose and Grimm.
But MGG is a better choice,really. This comic is more thoughtful than funny, and, these days, editors — in utter, cloth-eared defiance of the genre — expect political cartoons to be funny.
They also expect the comics on the comics page to be funny, but since they never look at them, you can do pretty much whatever you want to back there, as long as you don't say "boobs."
Normally, I'd end that thought with "But I digress," but you can't digress when you haven't started down any particular path yet.
But, okay, let's talk about what Christmas is and what it's supposed to be and who ruined it and who's gonna save it.
To start with, it is a commonplace to point out that Christmas is a mishmash of cultural beliefs. And, within that conversation, people generally point out that every culture north of the Tropic of Cancer holds some sort of festival or holiday or whathaveyou in the darkest portion of the year.
In fact, I'm currently reading a book on the Iroquois Confederacy in the American Revolution and learned that they also have a midwinter observance. This did not surprise me in the least.
Which reminds me of when I was researching something about the Sioux/Dakota/Lakota people a decade or so ago and, in the course of our conversation, asked the tribal historian at Standing Rock if it were true that religious beliefs were so deeply ingrained in all parts of Dakota life that their language had no actual word for "religion."
"No," he said. "We have a word for 'religion.'"
And he said it in a friendly tone, but one that made me suspect that it's very, very difficult to ask a tribal historian a question so utterly ridiculous that he's hearing it for the first time.
Which is also not a digression, because it's equally hard to come up with a view of Christmas so off-kilter that has not been held by plenty of people already. And posted on Facebook. Repeatedly.
And that's all-encompassing: It's not just the about the Christian Taliban who want everyone to worship exactly as they do, but also the equally humorless Fundmentalist Skeptics who can't see the beauty of the season through the mist of illogic, cultural mashups and dubious history that comes with it.
Dali, van Gogh and Chagall don't make sense either. Shut up and eat your Christmas cookies.
Separating the religious Christmas from the historical Christmas from the traditional Christmas is a fool's errand. By this time, it's so mixed up that taking out the parts you don't want would be like deciding you need to be gluten-free after the cake has come out of the oven and been frosted.
Fortunately, it is a free country. If you want to spend Christmas in prayer and reflection, nobody is going to feed you to the lions.
If, on the other hand, you want to spend it in joy and frivolity, you shouldn't have trouble finding some. If nothing else, there's fellowship at your local soup kitchen. You'll be welcome on either side of the counter.
And there's even a tradition for those who don't want to celebrate it at all: Chinese food and a movie.
St. Nicholas would probably have prayed on Christmas because he almost certainly prayed every day.
There were a lot of things St. Nicholas did every day, not just on his feast day of December 6, which didn't likely mean anything to him, or on the Feast of the Nativity, which remained unset in his part of the world until considerably after his time.
Maybe that made it easier for him: Not having a few days in which he was expected to act in a certain way may have spared him the temptation of thinking he didn't have to behave that way on the other days as well.
So St. Nicholas didn't have a word for "Christmas" because, while the idea was out there, the feast itself hadn't been invented. However, he did have a word for "religion" and, given that he was a bishop, he probably used it frequently.
On the other hand, religion seems to have been pretty firmly engrained in his life, too.
Reports are that he spent a great deal of his time ministering to the less fortunate, and, even if most of the traditions that have grown up around him would give Penn & Teller a rash, it's highly improbable that they would have grown up around a man who hadn't provided a solid core of charitable actions.
What were his intentions? He probably didn't have intentions. He just lived his life.
Anyway, I wouldn't recommend spending a lot of time trying to find out who took the Christ out of Christmas. It's no big mystery.
As Emerson said, "If we meet no gods, it is because we harbor none."
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