The outin-laws are on their way in from Texas today, and I’m home sick with a cold. Let that serve as a warning.
I’ve been alternately amused and annoyed by all the faux ecumenism this year: happy holidays, the true meaning of the season, and so on. Behind this celebration of a generic “holiday” and “season” was probably a sincere desire to include and to not offend. But when I watch evangelical co-workers trip over themselves remembering to substitute “happy holidays” for “merry christmas,” I wonder if it’s gone too far. Because their wishing me a “merry Christmas” is one of the kindest thing they can do.
We say “happy holidays,” but which holidays? Religious ones. We say “holiday season,” but which season? Precisely the season created by the confluence of those holidays—Divali, Ramadan, Hannukkah, Solstice, Christmas, and Kwanzaa—all of them the particular religious holidays of particular traditions.
That’s why I’m not sure that there even can be a “reason” for this ad hoc ecumenical “season.” It would need to be rather bland and abstract, making it little different from the secular adaptations of the meaning of Christmas—it’s “in your heart,” or worse, in the mall. (American Sentimentalist has a far better approach for secularist adaptation.)
Putting on my theologian hat, I see two potential ways out of this. One is to go through each of the particular religious holidays and look for actual similarities. My minister pointed out the frequency of candlelight, for instance. Staying with that example, the next step would be to look for similarities in the professed meaning of the use of candlelight. And so on with any other similarities.
A second approach would look for a stripped down version of Christmas, the most popular of these holidays even among folks who aren’t Christian. Just return to the bare narrative itself, stripped of doctrine, carols, Santa, and reindeer. What are we left with?
An unwed pregnant teen travels with her working-class boyfriend to his grandparent’s home town so that they may become numbers, as ordered by the powers-that-be. They’ve both been seeing visions about what this child means, and the girl’s religious aunt confirms their experiences with her own. When they arrive, they find lodging in the only place still available: a barn. There she gives birth to who the visions say will be the spiritual and political liberator of her conquered people, as promised by their one god. In time, they are visited by nearby shepherds, who have also seen visions, and priests from a foreign religion, who bring gifts worthy of a king. And then they go home.
UPDATE: “Happy holidays” may still be a good thing—see third paragraph here.
