Hey, It's the Solstice Buying Season

[thedrifter]

Hey, It's the Solstice Buying Season
By: Bill O'Reilly for BillOReilly.com
Thursday, Dec 01, 2005

Corporate America should get down on its knees and thank God that the baby Jesus was born two thousand plus years ago. Okay, how many people did I offend with that first sentence? Let's see, I mentioned praying to God, the baby Jesus, and even hinted at the celebration of Christmas. Totally out of line, don't you think?

The federal holiday of Christmas is once again under siege this year by secular forces that want to wipe out any public display of America's Judeo-Christian traditions. And what a problematic situation this has become, especially for big business. Sears and Kmart will absolutely not mention the word "Christmas" in advertising this year. Wal-Mart will not either, along with scores of other retail stores. The reason these operations give for avoiding the C-word is that they don't want to offend anyone by mentioning a holiday they might not celebrate. These stores believe the greeting "Happy Holidays" is more "inclusive," although I'm sure there are some Americans who don't believe in any holidays, so what about them?

Frankly, the executives who have banished Christmas from their advertising are insane. By doing that, they are offending tens of millions of traditional Americans who respect the Christmas season and want it called exactly what it is - Christmas.

Back in 1870, President U.S. Grant signed a law making Christmas a holiday for all American citizens. That's why you have the day off. That's why no mail is delivered. Santa is the only designated delivery guy on December 25. Can I say Santa? Is that inclusive?

There is a huge backlash brewing on this Christmas deal. Judging from reaction to my reporting on television and radio, millions of Americans have had enough of denigrating the birth of Jesus. The holiday honors peace and generosity in the name of a great philosopher who has had a tremendous influence on the USA. Eighty-five percent of Americans call themselves Christians and believe me, many of them are not happy with "Happy Holidays" as the imposed greeting of the season.

Federated Department Stores (that's Macys, Bloomingdales and others) learned its lesson last year when it pushed the "Merry Christmas" greeting out the door and sales suffered. This year Federated is back in the Christmas spirit, so to speak, using "Merry Christmas" along with other seasonal greetings to advertise stuff.

It's all so blatantly dumb. All these corporate geniuses have to do is incorporate all the greetings into the store brochures and displays. Most Christians are more than happy to acknowledge Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Happy Winter Time or whatever. Use them all, and to all a good night.

But no. The incredibly dense grinches that run many American companies are so infected with political correctness, so afraid somebody might complain about the word 'Christmas,' that they throw the baby Jesus out with the bathwater.

Well, humbug. You do that - I'm shopping elsewhere. Three wise men once came bearing gifts to honor a baby who would grow up to bring a great message to the world. If corporate chieftains are not wise enough to honor that message as well, they don't deserve any Christmas cheer. Simple as that.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

How the Christians Stole Christmas
Written by Steve Kellmeyer
Friday, December 02, 2005

‘Tis the season for complaining. Specifically, ‘tis the season for Christians to chatter and moan about America’s secular culture. “Happy Holidays” has replaced “Merry Christmas,” Kwanzaa is in and Christ is out, and as a Catholic, I’m expected to get upset. But it’s hard to do. As Grandpa might have said, after 500 years, a man jest gits tired.

For nearly half of the last millennium, Christians have slowly been chipping away at Christmas. Now, in imitation of Alexander the Great who wept because he had no more worlds to conquer, they caterwaul because they have nearly completed their task. Are they upset because it took so long or because it’s almost gone?

America’s Christians have fought long and hard for this day. Why aren’t they celebrating?

After all, the attack on Christmas began in a most ingenious fashion. Instead of attacking the day itself, the other major holy days of the year were first stripped away. The law of prayer is the law of belief, as the saying goes, and the law had to go.

Thomas More’s character in A Man for All Seasons summarized the situation nicely: “What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the devil?… Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coastman’s laws, not God’s and if you cut them down . . . d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? . . . Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.”

But the Christians who started the war against Christmas didn’t have the benefit of a good screenwriter, so they didn’t understand the consequences of their actions. The first holy day to be expunged from the Christian calendar, the first law of prayer to die, was All Holy Eve now known as Halloween. The man who murdered it? Martin Luther.

In 1517, he chose All Holy Eve, the vigil of All Saint’s Day, to attack the idea that those who had died deserved any respect or care from those who lived. According to Luther, prayer afforded no one grace. The Reformation literally converted the communion of saints into the coven of witches; every person who invoked the aid of the saints was now guilty of a demonic attempt to commune with the dead.

Not surprisingly, the rise of the Protestant Reformation created an incredible upsurge in demon-hunting and witch trials. Wherever Protestant strength undermined Catholic authority, the upper-class intellectuals of the day would drive secular mobs to burn and hang witches. Protestant ideology transformed All Holy Eve from a day of sanctity that commemorated communion with God into a day of evil commemorating Satan’s power.

It took a few centuries, but the first holy day had fallen. It would not be the last.

Throughout the whole expanse of the year, holy days began to decay into holidays. The most serious assaults were made on feast days whose Masses were celebrated with special joy.

How many people remember Candlemas? It is the Mass celebrating the Presentation of the Child Jesus in the Temple and the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Offered forty days after Christmas, Candlemas marks the end of the Christmas season, as everyone used to know:

Down with the rosemary, and so

Down with the bays and misletoe ;

Down with the holly, ivy, all,

Wherewith ye dress'd the Christmas Hall

Robert Herrick (1591-1674), "Ceremony upon Candlemas Eve"

By the late 1800’s, Americans had transformed this most ancient feast in honor of the Virgin Mary into Groundhog Day - a signal accomplishment in the continuing Protestant attempt to separate Catholic Church and state. And the two goals, the destruction of holy days and the separation of church and state, should not be seen as separated or separable.

After all, Martin Luther not only began the attack on holy days; he was also the first to propose the idea of church-state separation. Ironically, Luther’s deep devotion to Mary has gone down the same memory hole that has eaten the holy days, thus no one knows how Luther destroyed what he most loved. But it hardly matters. He is long since dead, and according to his own rules, his aid cannot be invoked by either side of the debate.

Meanwhile, the destruction proceeded apace. Michaelmas, the Mass offered on September 29th in celebration of St. Michael’s victory over Satan, became the day to settle rents and collect accounts. By the late 1800’s, it too had been stripped of all the celebratory hospitality that had marked it as a major feast of the Catholic Middle Ages.

Childermas, the December 28 Mass commemorating the Feast of the Holy Innocents slaughtered by Herod, was not replaced by another event so much as it was simply overcome by the commercialization of the holiday. It slipped into oblivion. America had won the war against nearly every major Mass in the liturgical calendar.

Indeed, between 1700 and 1776, not a single Mass was celebrated in New York City - it was illegal. And, if it had not been necessary for American Protestants to employ French Catholic military support, priests would not have been present to celebrate Mass in New York during the Revolution either. The Mass had long since been stripped out of Protestant society like meat from the bone.

Candlemas, Childermas, Michaelmas, and now Christmas. Is it any wonder that a population who opposed any celebration of the Mass would eventually oppose the Mass celebrating Christ’s own birth?

Catholics complained when Protestants stripped the Mass out of Christmas. Now Protestants complain that atheists will strip Christmas out of the calendar.

But what, exactly, is the problem with obliterating all reference to Christ’s Mass? Isn’t this what America has been working to accomplish for 200 years?

About the Writer: Steve Kellmeyer is a nationally recognized author and lecturer who integrates today's headlines with the Catholic Faith. His work is available through www.bridegroompress.com. He can be contacted at skellmeyer@bridegroompress.com.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Keep the Christ in Christ
By Patrick Hynes
Published 12/2/2005 12:08:26 AM

A friend recently gave me a sleeve of stickers to affix to my Christmas cards that read "Keep the Christ in Christmas." While I strongly agree with the sentiment, I fear it may be too late. Anyone who has seen news footage of idiots duking it out over the last X-Box 360 on the Wal-Mart shelf would have to agree that the War on Christmas is over and the materialists won.

And they aren't even magnanimous in victory. They're rubbing it in our faces. Have you seen the latest Honda commercial? It features the song "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" -- a secular ditty if ever there was one -- only the ad wizards changed the words and mangled the tune to recast the song as "We Wish You a Happy Holiday":

We wish you a happy holiday
We wish you a happy holiday
We wish you a happy holiday
And a happier new year

Advertisers seem to have given up on trying not to offend anyone and have instead come to realize offending Christians is inevitable. Whatever. As the man said, I'd rather push a Ford than drive a Honda.

It's only natural, I suppose, that Christ should be robbed of His Big Day. Everywhere we turn in the common culture, the Jesus of the Bible has been replaced by the Jesus of the Da Vinci Code. For example, my wife and I hosted two couples over the Thanksgiving weekend. Perfectly willing to shatter the rule about not discussing religion at the dinner table, I brought up the subject of Unitarianism, as two of our guests had attended a Unitarian church over an extended period of time during the 1990s and early-2000s, though they no longer do. They believe in a god, they were swift to assure me, but they were unwilling to accept the divinity of Christ. Was he a great moral teacher? Of course. All you need to do is read the Bible to know that, they told me. But the idea that He is God is simply too much for them to grasp. In other words, God may not necessarily be dead, but Christ sure is (though, it must be stated, He's well known for His comebacks.)

It is fortuitous, then, that Mr. Clive Staples Lewis has once again entered the public dialogue by way of the December 9th cinematic release of his masterwork of children's literature The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Certain to be among the year's blockbusters, it will also serve as one of those "water cooler" cultural moments. While a tad subtler than Mel Gibson's graphic The Passion of the Christ, TLTWTW will nevertheless similarly find us talking about Christianity again.

But it is Lewis's works in the field of Christian apologetics that provide the best ointment for the open sore of Jesus-was-just-a-really-nice-guy-ism. More than anything Lewis wrote in The Chronicles of Narnia, this blurb from his The Case for Christianity eviscerates the proposition that Jesus was a great moral philosopher, but in no way divine:

I am trying here to prevent anyone from saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him [Jesus Christ]: "I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God."

That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic -- on a level with a man who says he is a poached egg -- or else he would be the Devil of Hell.

You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God,: or else a madman or something worse....You can shut him up for fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come up with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great humanteacher. He has not left that option open to us. He did not intend to.

Ah, but there is a third option, my guests argued. The Gospels were written some forty years after the death of Jesus of Nazareth. Isn't it possible that He was just a wise teacher but that His followers embellished the stories about His teachings to include his claims of divinity?

This proposition is the subject of the cover story in this month's Harper's titled "Jesus Without the Miracles: Thomas Jefferson's Bible and the Gospel of Thomas" and written by Erik Reece, a lecturer in English at the University of Kentucky. Jefferson, the reader will recall, clipped his favorite phrases of Jesus from the New Testiment to create The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. And the Gospel of Thomas is a Gnostic collection of sayings attributed to Jesus, but which were probably written a hundred years or so after the canonical Gospels.

But it isn't logical to conclude that Jesus was a wise teacher who was later turned into God by fawning enthusiasts because His wise teachings and His claims to divinity were recorded by the same people. If we cannot know that He did in fact say, "All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me," then we can't know that he actually said "Blessed are ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God." It defies logic that His disciples were meticulous scribes of his moral pronouncements but zealous fabulists about everything else. They were either telling the whole truth or a whole lie. And considering they spread the Gospels under penalty of merciless torture and death, it seems unlikely they were lying. Would you allow yourself to be crucified upside down for a lie?

No, you wouldn't. But would you for a mistake? There is another possibility my dinner guests did not suggest. Suppose Jesus was just a slick magician performing parlor tricks for the rubes, sort of like when I disconnect my index finger to impress my niece and nephew, and the dern country mice fell for it and started following him around. But if this was the case, wouldn't the yokels have given up on Him after He was captured and killed and they became the subject of public ridicule for having believed him? I know the day will come when my niece and nephew will realize I can't actually remove my finger and instead I just configure my thumb to look like the tip of my finger. On that day their faith in my "magical powers" will die and they'll just roll their eyes and run off to play Power Rangers. Truth be told, some of Jesus' disciples' faith was shaken. But then He rose from the dead and issued to them the Great Commission to spread the Good News. That must have been one hell of a parlor trick because these fishers of men bought it hook, line and sinker. While it is possible that Jesus was just a first century Doug Henning, the idea that he could raise himself from the dead is an incredible stretch.

And so we are left only with Lewis' formulation. Jesus was either the Son of God or a nut or the Devil himself. Too many in academia, the news media, and the religious and political Left are unwilling to consider the former and few of us can even fathom the consequences of the latter two. And so a great many Americans have chosen the least logical conclusion: they have constructed an image of a polite, well-meaning Jewish boy who had some compelling thoughts on how people should treat one another. As Reece writes in Harper's, "My main focus is to look at the actual teachings of the reformer we call Jesus, and not be burdened with sin, sacrifice and salvation."

We have taken the Christ out of Jesus Christ. Is it any wonder then that we have taken Christ out of Christmas, as well?

Patrick Hynes, the proprietor of AnkleBitingPundits.com, is writing a book on the Religious Right for Nelson Current.

Ellie

[mrbsox]

As for me and my family, it's

CHRISTMAS

Remember the
REASON for the SEASON

Semper Fidelis
to God, Country, and Corps