Christmas

All the Christmas movies are on TV. And there seem to be more every year. Of course, the older ones tend to be better, maybe because they’re not pure commercialism – although all movies are ultimately made for commercial reasons.

The funny thing is that, even when the movies are shown in the afternoon, there are commercials for “Preparation H”, an ointment for the relief of haemerrhoids. Not entirely appropriate. It makes you yearn for the days when there weren’t medications for haemerrhoids and “feminine itch”, so that it was socially acceptable to just scratch (maybe not entirely true, at least for people of the female persuasion).

I listened to an interesting program on the radio recently. Every year we hear the familiar cry: “Put the Christ back in Christmas”. The caller on the radio, obviously a devout Christian, was proposing a radical alternative: “Take Christ out of Christmas”. I’m sure I can’t reproduce his arguments exactly, but here’s the gist of it. Christmas has always had very little to do with Christ, mostly because he was a baby at the time, and had little to contribute other than looking cute. Easter, of course, is a totally different story, because he’d had time to experience life and all its lessons, and could offer meaningful commentary on the way on which we should live it. But Christmas … well, it has mostly become a commercial tradition (probably based largely on more ancient traditions anyway), from which Christ is slowly being elbowed out. So, rather than wait for the inevitable, why don’t we just rename “Christmas” as “Yuletide” (or whatever), give up the pretence, and concentrate on Easter as a Christian festival.

You’ll know already that I’m not particularly religious, in the accepted sense. I believe in Christian values, but I believe that they’re also Moslem values, and Jewish values, and Hindu values. And I believe in a higher power, with whom I can commune just as well outside a church (although there are times when communities or friends need to share, and church is an excellent place to do it) as in it. And so I can’t say that I oppose this viewpoint. I might even go further and endorse it – after all, we’re way past the point of de-commercialising Christmas.