The Meaning Of Christmas

 General  No Responses »
Dec 162016
 

Without doubt, there will shortly be a pompous old fart moaning about how the meaning of christmas is being lost in the swirl of holiday celebrations. She (or he) will be droning on about the religious message. Only christians are supposed to celebrate, and are supposed to stick to the script – heading to a church in the middle of the night to listen to a pompous old fart drone on about some weird stuff.

Poppycock!

Not that I object to people wanting to listen to a pompous old fart droning on about weird stuff – that’s their choice. What I object to is being told I have to celebrate Christmas in their way. Despite the name, I can decide to celebrate it any way I want.

Now I could go on about how Christmas is merely a new name for a mid-winter festival that has been going on for thousands of years, or that some christians avoid Christmas like it sprang fully formed from the mind of Satan. And I probably have in the past, but that is beside the point.

For whatever reason, it has been decided in the western world (and a bit further) that most of us will have a few days (or a week) off work in the middle of winter for a break. And we choose how to celebrate.

To me, Christmas is about family and friends. Getting together and relaxing for a while – a few hours, or a few days.

Happy Winter Solstice from this pompous old fart, and celebrate it any way you choose.

The Storm In The Red Cup

 Religion  No Responses »
Nov 122015
 

Starbucks (apparently a well-known brand of coffee shop for those of us who prefer to make their own coffee rather than pay over the odds for a infusion of caffeine) have introduced a plain red cup for the holiday season, christmas, Xmas, Mythmas, or the Winter Solstice (depending on what you want to call it). In previous years, Starbucks had decorated cups for the holiday season – decorated with snowflakes, etc. In other words generic seasonal symbols.

This year they have gone for a plain cup to encourage their customers to doodle.

For some reason the religious nutjobs (given their behaviour you can't really call them anything else) have taken umbrage at this – claiming that Starbucks are trying to take the Christ out of Christmas. Which demonstrates the emotional maturity of a toddler crying because she can't catch her shadow, as the Starbucks' seasonal cups have never included overtly religious symbols.

There is even one of the less rational Republican candidates for president (which equates to a gibbering megalomaniac) who thinks that we ought to boycott Starbucks over the issue.

When you come down to it, Starbucks has given these religious fruitcakes the opportunity to put Christ into the holiday season by giving them an empty space on their Starbucks cups to doodle their designs.

Xmas Rail Chaos: Time To Stop The Holiday Works

 General  No Responses »
Dec 282014
 

So we have another story about how overrunning maintenance work on our railways has caused travel chaos. One of the things to remember is that we only hear about the overruns and not the successfully completed work. I would not be surprised if only a tiny minority of work overruns.

But that isn’t much comfort to those caught up in the chaos.

Somewhere within National Rail, there is a department that decides when engineering work can take place, and they will have made a calculation to determine when the least “costly” overruns can be scheduled. They probably make this calculation based on the number of travel hours lost.

But perhaps they are not considering the quality of those hours lost. Some travel is more valuable than other travel; not in simple economic terms, but including other factors such as the amount of distress caused.

Holiday travel is a bit different to everyday travel in that :-

  1. People tend to travel further and make more connections. Disrupting their travel could well leave them stranded in an unfamiliar environment.
  2. More “vulnerable” people travel for holidays – children and old people – who are less likely to cope well with the disruption.
  3. Frankly most normal people value their holiday trips higher than their work trips; missing a day’s work because you cannot get in is mildly annoying, but missing a holiday is devastating.
  4. Lastly, making alternative arrangements is much more possible during normal working hours.

Of course nothing will change because all this will make no difference to those in charge who have chauffeur driven cars to take them everywhere and who regularly get their ears bent by industry pressure groups.

The Origin And Importance Of Christmas …

 General, Religion  No Responses »
Dec 032013
 

Before those po-faced spoilsports start jumping up and down screaming that Christmas is supposed to be all about the baby jesus, let’s take a look at the origins of Christmas…

Turns out that it might not be an exclusively Christian thing after all – despite “his” name being right there in the name – as it seems there have been other religious festivals at around the same time of year. And long before Christianity.

After all the puritans did oppose Christmas as being too “pagan”. And there is a lesson to be learnt from the mistakes made during the English Civil War – however long ago it may have been – whilst the ultra-religious are perfectly free to believe that Christmas is all about religion, it is plain that the overwhelming majority of the population are more interested in the party aspect of Christmas.

No harm in that. There’s a lot to be said for having a party or two with friends, co-workers, and family in the “bleak mid-winter”. No reason to introduce any religious poppycock if that isn’t your thing.

But where did this notion of paganism in association with Christmas come from? It turns out that having a mid-winter festival has been popular for ages :-

  1. Yule is a Germanic mid-winter festival that has vestiges in our current celebration of Christmas such as the Yule log and probably the Christmas tree.
  2. Saturnalia was an ancient Roman festival in honour of the god Saturn marked with revelries and gift giving.
  3. The Winter Solstice has probably been “celebrated” as a brief time of plenty before the famine months of winter begin, for thousands of years. Holly, Ivy, Mistletoe are all aspects of Christmas with a potential pagan past.

There is a tradition that the date of Christmas was deliberately chosen to match the dates of existing religious festivals; whether this is true or not is almost irrelevant. What is almost certainly true is that the importance of the christian festival of Christmas owes a great deal to earlier mid-winter festivals.

After all Christians are masters of the art of syncretism.