Just leave Father Christmas alone you PC weasels

As far as important dates in the Christian calendar are concerned, Christmas was always well down the list. In that respect people shouldn’t get excessively distressed about the secularization of the December 25th season. Those early monks and martyrs paid it no heed but instead saved their fealty energies for Easter. Easter and Good Friday are the genuine biggies for those who believe in the Christian story.

In fact, Christmas as we have come to either love or loathe it really doesn’t go back much further than Victorian times when Teutonic consort Prince Albert brought a lot of German traditions across the Channel.

It was given a further boost by Charles Dickens with A Christmas Carol. Good old Ebenezer, the only guy in the tale with any gumption, and he’s the one that gets reviled. Oh, well. Anyway, the fact that Scrooge pays no heed to Christmas was not out of the ordinary in the England of 1843, when the book was published. The fact that whining Bob Cratchit wants the ‘whole day’ off would have been quite out-of-keeping in most workplaces of the time, so Scrooge was probably possibly correct in being contemptuous of his seemingly indolent clerk.

As we know, once the Christmas concept was marketed it simply took off. Churches, of course, attempted to quell the rampant commercial extravagance of the season by reminding their parishioners and others of the ‘true’ meaning of Christmas, which was a celebration of the birth of Christ. Yes, the Christ thing was nice, and the Three Wise Men, and shepherds watching their flocks and all, and pretty, semi-sacred songs, but what most people really embraced was the Teutonic Kris Kringle thing. Yes, Santa Claus, Father Christmas, Jolly old St. Nick, and stockings hung by the chimney with care. That was really what all and sundry came to cherish.

At the same time, there arose a grumpy-pants battalion of those who felt Christmas, as we’d come to see it was nothing more than a testament to greed. Parents and others were driven into penury trying to satiate the gaping maws of greedy kids who wanted more-more-more. Newspapers came to be filled with heart-rending tales of poor families in which the kids weren’t getting’ nuthin’ and for which you should feel really bad and cough up a few toys and a few bucks, and then with clear conscience you could forget about them for the rest of the year.

Meanwhile, there have always been those individuals whose memories of Christmases past were not cheery. They recalled nasty times of alcohol abuse, family rows, never getting the toys requested, and so forth. Crisis lines exist for those people, as do chock-a-block filled shrink wards, detox facilities, and jails.

Do my comments suggest that I want to kill Christmas, too? Not at all. While there are aspects of the ‘season’ I detest, there are others that I value. Periodically I have even been known to attend a church service on Christmas eve because I love carols by a choir and some of the pageantry of it all. In that I wish we had a cathedral in our town with a massive pipe organ. Powerful organs (of the pipe variety, that is) can bring a tear to my eye. Anyway, I think in a world of too much weariness and travail, we need whatever festivities we can muster, and Christmas is one of those festive things that can take us from the mundane.

But, there are those who carry it all to an extreme. I read of a bunch of elementary teachers in England who want to obliterate all references to Father Christmas, not to mention any Christian messages in order to avoid offending ethnic minorities. To them I would ask, did any of those minorities actually ask you to do this? Furthermore, do you also refrain from references to Ramadan and Passover? I bet not. Situational PCs are offensive to all concerned, so get a grip.

Secondly, and more importantly, I will offer a suggestion. If Christmas means nothing to you and therefore gives you leave to steal it from children, why do you take that Christmas vacation? Why not give it up and just go to work as you normally would.

Bunch of killjoys and PC fascists that you are.