And Merry Christmas to you – from an unbeliever who wishes all y’all believers, “underperforming” or otherwise, whatever measure of joy (or sadness or whatever) y’all’s holidays call for. And getchergrubbymitts off my day off If you prefer to celebrate on Jan 7, make yourself happy.

I’ll survive parking farther away than I’d prefer, walking farther than I’d prefer, standing in line longer than I’d prefer, and being nearly blinded by lights everywhere I turn. I find that the tic I develop from hearing 3,000 renditions of I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Clause is generally cured by a decent dose of non-French bubbly on New Year’s eve. My compensation is the, perhaps imagined, thread of human good-will and warmth winding its way through all the commercialized nonsense and trumped up animosities. That and the annual renewal of my sweater collection.

/sick-sense of humor

I have been out of pocket and have missed a great thread but I do want to give you my take on where Christmas should go.

As a [underperforming] Christian who also has Jewish ancestors [ain't I multi-cultural] I would love to see Christmas de-institutionalized. Why? Because it’s my holiday! I no longer want the secular/non religious world simultaneously to exploit and denigrate my faith and practices. Let’s end the practice of giving a free day off to non-believers.

Treating Christmas as a private religious holiday will have positive effects on the non-believing portion of the population. For one thing, it will spare the secularist from having to troop through malls looking for gifts. It will have a salutary effect on the economy by better spreading purchases over the entire year.

I remember how my Eastern Orthodox friends celebrated a very holy Christmas season when they were still on the old calendar. They had no problem taking the day off as annual leave. That is the least sacrificial action a Christian could do. I am tempted to go farther then merely ending the Federal Christmas Day holiday and recommending we celebrate the day on the Julian Calendar, i.e., Jan 7. That would certainly detach the Christmas from the secular world.

One more thing, when I say end the Federal Holiday, I don’t mean add an additional one to make up for it. It should be a net loss. So I say to you secular humanists you have no right to a freebie that you do not accept.

In the meantime Merry Christmas to all, and a belated Happy Hanukah too. As for this Holiday holiday, I do not know thee.

Just this morning I was subjected to Yet Another BDS sufferer pissing and moaning that that he’d heard a nearby auto assembly plant was closing. “They’re lying to us about the economy! If the economy is so good 1200 people wouldn’t be losing their jobs!”

That plant has been closing since I was a kid. And each time it’s been {Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush}’s fault and each time the “reason” was “they’re lying to us about the economy!”

I don’t wish unemployment on anyone. Its always sad when people lose their jobs. But dangit it all, it ain’t POTUS’s job to make sure that every American keeps their job until such time as they don’t want it anymore. If the plant closes this time it’s because it’s time for the plant to close. “They” may or may not be “lying to us about the economy!”, but there are reasons other than lies that plants close and people lose jobs.

Because, in the end, you have must remember, it is all about Jewish oppression of the rest of the world. After all, there are so many examples of it throughout history. Richelieu and Mazarin were Hassidic rabbis, the Founding Fathers were premature Zionists, Charles Martel was secretly a Sharon on his mother’s side, Custer was a Galitzianer…

Is it so hard to think to oneself, “well, I don’t celebrate Hanukkah, but I hope everyone else has a happy one?”

What a great way to look at things. People get themselves lathered up about stuff when they really should just Let It Freakin’ Be. I’m just venting here but this is one of my pet peeves and I’m always fighting myself not to get all lathered up about people getting themselves lathered up.

Once upon a time I was at a Christmas party that seemed to be, by all measures I judge such things, going just wonderfully. People were yacking away and having a grand old time. One of the guests had parked himself at a piano and was clanging out Christmas caroles and a bunch of other people had gathered around and were singing. I happened to park my fat arse to just soak it in and enjoy when I notice the guy next to me looks none too happy. Hey, yo, wassup? He proceeds to splat out a long littany of complaints about how the guy at the piano plays like crap and how he hates Christmas caroles and how Christmas has been ruined and yaddayaddafreakinyadda.

And it isn’t uncommon. I’ve been doing Yet Another Knucklehead’s Unscientific Research Project trying to figure out why so many people are so freakin’ torqued up about Christmas and either want it killed outright or converted to so a secular holiday. I started out with the theory that such people were radical secularists or atheists. Some are. But as far as I’ve been able to discern the more I investigate the bulk of it is just pettiness. They’re pissed off because their favorite radio stations are playing too much Christmas music. They’re pissed off ’cause they can’t go shopping without seeing all the Christmas stuff. They find the lights and blow up Grinches tacky. Well, too freakin’ bad. Get over it. Its 30 freakin’ days and you’ll live through it.

Why do so many people find misery in other people’s joy? If Christmas is ruined it’s been ruined for a long freakin time and it ain’t coming back. Get over it. If singing caroles makes some people feel good and they don’t give a rat’s butt if they don’t sing particularly well and the piano man is a hacker, why should you? Wear earplugs, move to the other side of the room, go home, learn to ignore, do something besides sit and be miserable because other people are joyous. If Hannukah or Kwanzi or Christmas or the Druid Dance of the Virgins draws some people together to find a common cause to smile and laugh and, heaven forbid, sing, let it be.

Sorry, /vent.

“But imagine if Jews were the majority and the rest of us had to pass a “Happy Hanukkah” sign on the way into the City and County Building.”

Is it so hard to think to oneself, “well, I don’t celebrate Hanukkah, but I hope everyone else has a happy one?”

Being part Jewish and part Ulster Orange (the family left in the 19thC.) in ancestry, and always wishing to imagine similarities between the two, I was struck by your comment re the Israeli flag on lamp posts. Do you know how that started? Was it in reaction to the Palestinian flag or did it start with the Protestants?”

I grew up in the 70s when IRA terrorism was a daily, even hourly, event, and there was tremendous frustration in the Protestant population regarding the government response – or lack thereof. Loyalist vigilantes/terrorists would retaliate, often randomly, against Catholics and I remember the consensus being if our government responded the way the Israelis did to the PLO there wouldn’t be these Protestant vigilante/terrorists taking the law into their own hands. Amongst Protestants there was always a feeling of kinship towards Israelis due to the similarity of our situations – outnumbered by our enemies with the smug fashionable people who dominated the world media blaming us even when we were the victims of bombings. When you are under siege in a hostile world liberalism is a luxury you can’t afford.

I suppose the Calvinism of slightly over half the Protestant population may also have played a part as it has historically been more friendly to Jews than Catholicism. Irish nationalist support for the Germans in two world wars might also have contributed to the Protestant pro-Israel sentiment: the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

I’m not placing too much emphasis on data – more or less just poking around – individual people behave completely irrationally and can do so in very large groups. Modern western governments, however, generally have some calculated reasons for the things they do.

Even if Europeans managed to rid themselves of the hated Jews and Israel they would conjure new and hidden Jews out of thin air. They’d simply find reasons to acuse people of being perfidous Jews.

Because the Jew has always been a problem for Euro-Christian ethics and morality, it is not at all inconceivable to me that the Europeans, wanting oil, will help the Arabs, Persians, etc. destroy Israel. But if all the Jews are driven into the sea, do you think the Euros will be able to give up their long traditions of Judeophobia? Do you think that if the Nazis had succeeded in wiping Jews from the earth, that they would have been able to forget their antisemitism and still undertand themselves as Nazis, let alone Germans? Sure they would have found new enemies, but ideas about Jews would have remained essential to understanding where they came from. Like the “antisemitism without Jews” found today in parts of eastern Europe, such resentmens might seem irrational to observers with hard numbers; yet such would remain if Nazi-German-western identities were to have a raison d’etre.

It is possible that, over time, antisemites may increasingly learn to grasp this paradox, that they cannot escape from remembering the scenes on which their resentments are defined, no matter how many they kill, and so decide it is better for their morale to accept the Jews for what they are and live with them, and urge their arab partners do too. But that will take moral courage if the need for oil gets fierce. Maybe we need to remind them where moral courage comes from. This will mean discussing our shared ethical, or religious, history.