I Will Not Have An American Christmas Again

I increasingly hate American holidays.   I don't just mean the way that Memorial Day, The Fourth of July and  Armistice Day have been turned into a glorification of an imperial military that, not only murders and plunders on behalf of big business but also destroys the men and women it recruits, sends to fight even the most obviously illegal wars to be chewed up and spit out like chewing tobacco.

When there isn't a motive of imperial conquest in our holidays, every single other aspect of them has been transformed into a duty to shop and consume and run up the profits of the corporations, even as you go into debt to do it.  None of those is so suited to that as Christmas.   I won't go through the entirely familiar festival of orgiastic, mammonist frenzy it is now, that's such a non-secret that no one needs to talk about it.  So, this year and from now on, I'm going to avoid spending any money on Christmas, nor will I accept any presents.  I've got more than I need and my tiny little house needs nothing it doesn't have. Christmas to my dog is superfluous, every meal time and every exit and every return home is Christmas to him.  The cats are too cool for the Yule.

To get in the spirit of the season, I'll be rereading something I've read every year since it was first published, Garrison Keillor's protest against the secularization of what is a religious holiday.  A holiday that honors someone who was a model of non-acquisition, who had no home, who left his job to be be a preacher and who advised people to sell all they had and give the money they got away to people who wouldn't repay it.

The secularization of Christmas is especially on my mind a week after writing about the Nazi's plans on de-Christianizeing Germany (including, especially, Christmas) and, I would guess, eventually the world.   That the bastardization of "Silent Night" he mentions was probably done out of some kind of niceness, if not some demonstration of supposed liberality doesn't keep it from seeming a bit creepy. That people who probably believe they are being good liberals would think they were making progress by excluding the major figure in liberalism in the history of the world can go along with the other examples of Harvard based puddingheadedness he uses to make his point.

* I like Crossan's interpretation instead of the more common one, "poor", making it possible to set the poor against the destitute.  And it has also set things up so that even the deserving poor are to be junked to die in the most deChristianized systems of thought, especially those under the influence of Malthus, such as I've written about so often.  I will probably write more about that in the coming weeks.  I don't think there was ever anything more damaging to liberalism than what the British class system did to Christianity.  You can read about that in the fascinating book A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland Showing how that event impoverished the main body of people in those countries by William Cobbett.