KEEP CHRIST OUT OF “CHRISTMAS,” 2009 EDITION

11/26/09

The new truths and admonitions of “Christmas,” as celebrated in modern America and as reflected in our most salient contribution to world culture, our media:

--The level to which one is enjoying “Christmas” can best be measured by one’s level of stress and anxiety. If you’re not short, snappy, angry, generally fed-up, and exhausted, you’re not adequately celebrating “Christmas.”

--Forget that feint toward fiscal sobriety you began in the wake of the collective spending binge that got us into the economic soup from which eminences in the economics profession tell us we are currently emerging…get out there and spend lots and lots of money you don’t have. Why, it’s Christmas! And the perfect cure for an economy that was nearly driven off the edge by too much leverage is more leverage, much like the cure for excessive debauchery (done to celebrate “Christmas,” of course) is a little hair of the dog. Works every time…for awhile.

--Ladies, if a man loves you, he will show it by buying you jewelry at “Christmas” time.

--If a man doesn’t buy you jewelry for “Christmas,” he doesn’t love you.

--If he does buy you jewelry, he surely loves you and the only response is to melt into his arms and be willing to commit your life to him. After all, he bought you jewelry. And it doesn’t matter if he is a drunk, a philanderer, a flim-flam man, or even a Chicago alderman. If he bought you jewelry, he is worthy of all your love.

--Another good way to show one’s love, once one has bought every worthless shiny trinket the jewelry industry foists on the naïve, is to buy one’s love a car. And not just any car, but, rather, a Mercedes, a Lexus, or a car with a similar pedigree. One presumes that love means never having to drive a VW or a Toyota.

--“Christmas” time is an ideal time for holiday parties featuring plenty of drunken lasciviousness. These are perfect occasions for cheating on one’s spouse and shrugging off one’s transgressions with the imbecilic and inherently contradictory rationalization “Hey, it was Christmas.”

--Now is the time to teach the timeless lessons of “Christmas” to the next generation…those lessons of greed, materialism, rudeness, anxiety, stress, and me-meism so manifest in our modern celebration of “Christmas.” Teach your kids to be greedy from a tender age; after all, according to the experts, we have to spend, spend, spend if our over leveraged economy is ever to get back on track.

--The only use for the old Christmas hymns and carols is to employ as tunes into which we can insert lyrics encouraging us to spend. Witness the current ad for the Illinois lotto which uses the tune of “Joy to the World” to list all the people who are worthy of scratch-offs this holiday season.

--The most appropriate Christmas dinner conversation, besides what you got or where you are going to recover from the holidays, is why in the world we are expected to spend so much time in church at this busy time of the year, what a pain it was to get into our out of the church parking lot, and how crowded Mass was with all those people who only come to church twice a year. And it’s perfectly appropriate to ask why, if it’s Christmas, the recessional song was not “Jingle Bell Rock” or “Santa Baby.”

--Whatever you do, don’t acknowledge in any way that this holiday was originally designed to celebrate that Guy who was born some 2000 years ago to bring salvation to the world. He is so bad for business, and he mocks the modern American way. Thinking of Him during this time of materialistic licentiousness only makes us feel guilty, and what do we have to be guilty about? We’re only celebrating Christmas, for God’s sake!

The only favorable development over the last twenty or thirty years in what we still laughingly, or, more properly, sacrilegiously, call “Christmas” is that we increasingly call it something else—“holiday time,” “the winter holiday,” the “end of year celebration,” or some other anodyne tripe. This is great—I don’t want Christ’s name in any way associated with the way we celebrate this senseless and silly bacchanal.

God bless you all at Christmas time. It can be such a wonderful, holy time not only of commemorating the birth of our Savior, but also to renew our determination to have Him come into our hearts and enlighten our lives. Don’t waste it. Don’t join the rest of society in slapping Him in the face on His birthday, of all days.

And to those of you who will celebrate Hannukah in the coming weeks…have a blessed and holy holiday, and thank you for sharing your Son, and your faith, with us.