NYC Letter: Joyeux Noël +3

We have surfaced from the holiday cloud, none too steadily. We'd appreciate your skimming quietly.

If on the 25th you thought you were celebrating the winter solstice, please get your head on straight, click here. Why do secular humanists so love the pagan shindies? Ah, because the pagan gods are quarrelsome, petty, and libidinous. They exercise poor judgment, act too soon or too late. They are an all-powerful huddle of wantons, cheats, drunks, gossips, bullies, and wilting sentimentalists. They are, dear reader, humanists perched among the clouds.

Those humanists who aren't busy with Uranus, are busy about the important work of sanitizing Christmas, making it a less meaningful, more general, less spiritual, more colorless non-day. They do this by extracting that obnoxious religious imposition, that suffocating religious personality, the Christ. No Christ is needed for you to shop extravagantly, to overcharge your plastic, to drink and eat to excess, to clear your conscience with a nominal annual check to some faceless charity. To introduce the Christ into Christmas, well, that is to introduce the whole Christmas story, which displaces man as the measure of all things, which, alas, confounds the humanist project.

But not all Christians are resigned to sharing Christmas with latterday Mithraists or gutting it to please humanists and the hostilely non-religious and anti-religious. [Hat tip: the indispensable Hervé]

'WE PRAY 2006 IS YEAR OF PEACE, FORGIVENESS -
AND THE END OF ABSURD POLITICAL CORRECTNESS'

December 26, 2005 (Scotsman) - The Moderator of the Church of Scotland yesterday used his traditional address to deliver what he termed a "very non-PC" sermon criticising attempts to remove the Christian message from Christmas.

The Church of Scotland's leader [The Right Reverend David Lacy] took a direct swipe at what some critics claim is the growing tendency by local authorities and public organisations to remove the Christian content from Christmas.

He denounced the American habit of calling Christmas "the holidays" as a way of avoiding potential offence to othr faiths as "ludicrous political correctness".

Speaking to a congregation at Kilmarnock Henderson Church, the Rev Lacy said: "If I was to try to please the PC brigade, the modern secularists and the fashionable cynics, my message might go something like this: 'Please accept, with no obligation implied or implicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress, non- addictive, gender neutral, celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practised within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasions and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practise religious or secular traditions at all."

In an uncompromising address the Rev Lacy referred to the biblical account of Jesus's birth.

He said: "It underlines a very religious point: That Jesus was not a nice idea, some kind of mythological figure, the stories of whom it's nice to repeat; he really was born in a real place and a real time."

This year while shopping, we were amused by the desperate oversolicitude of sales clerks wishing us "Merry Christmas" at every possible turn, the large retailers having realized few "Siberian shamans" shop their stores.

Christians do not insist that Iowa Admission Day admit to roots in Childermas (both 12.28.05), nor National Girls and Women In Sports Day look back to Ash Wednesday (02.09.05), nor National Infertility Survival Day share the message of Rogation Sunday (05.01.05), and they do not insist that International Pickle Week mention the pickle barrel of St. Nicolaus. Christians, not unreasonably, only ask that Christ keep His preeminence in Christmas.

We thank all who visited this past year, whether by intention or by accident, and all who skimmed, the few who read, and the fewer still who commented. Here we belatedly wish all Merry Christmas, whether Christian or Grinch, and the best in the year ahead.