Saturday's New York Times ran a piece about religious conservatives' bizarre campaign to commercialize Christmas. Apparently conservatives are taking on Target for not using the phrase "Merry Christmas" in their advertising campaigns; and others for using the phrase "holiday tree" instead of Christmas tree. Conservative Fox TV commentator Bill O'Reilly is even running a list of department stores' holiday greetings and is polling his viewers about whether they will shop at stores where thy are not greeted with "Merry Christmas." (Don't these people have enough to occupy their time? Hello folks, what about the war in Iraq? Maybe they need to go back and continue trying to beat up Harry Potter).
I find this emphasis on holiday shopping all rather odd because in my growing-up years, we used to hear the phrase "put Christ back into Christmas" and we were actively discouraged from all the Santa commercial stuff. My pious mother followed suit, so much so that, for a number of years, our Christmas tree had no ornaments, and simply sprouted up from behind the very large nativity set she'd made. My dad has told me that when he was a little boy--and a new immigrant from Norway--Christmas was pretty much limited to new mittens my grandmother knit, and oranges supplied by his Uncle Jørgen. That's more or less the standard immigrant experience, and it's similar to the way Christmas was observed in the Old Country, at least according to Kathleen Stokker's very excellent book on the subject, Keeping Christmas: Yuletide Traditions In Norway & The New Land.
As a Pagan, I feel like I've stepped out of what my friend Macha calls "the overculture." What I now do at this time of year has nothing to do with what's going on in the department stores or in the churches. As I watch the turning of the wheel, I think about the waxing and the waning of the light. For me, the high point of the season is going with my friends to sing up the sun on solstice morning at Inspiration Point in Tilden Park, and filling my house with candlelight to banish the darkness. I don't have to buy stuff, and there's really no way I can imagine that someone would manage to commercialize my celebration of standing in the pre-dawn light on a hillside, awaiting the new sun. If my winter celebration falls into the category of what Marguerite Perrin would call "dark-sided," well then, so be it. After all, people have been celebrating the solstice much longer than any other winter holiday.
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