Every year, on the Tuesday after
I like to joke the festival begins with
That done, the city’s Christians take over. Downtown fills with tent-canopied booths, nearly all of ’em set up by local churches. We give out cookies, cocoa, cider, and other treats. Our choirs sing. Open-air Christmas pageants are performed. One megachurch in particular handles crowd control and cleanup.
“What’s with all the Christians?” a friend commented years ago.
“Well it is our holiday,” I reminded him.
I find it a drastic contrast. My family does too. I’m usually there early to set up and work my church’s booth, so I see everything. My family, most years, skips the newspaper’s opening festivities, ’cause all they care about are the church booths. Because I’m manning the booth, I kinda ignore the pagan tree-lighting stuff at the beginning. And the few times I’m not in a booth, I go to Starbucks and get something egg-nog-flavored, then go check out the sister churches in town.
Whereas the non-Christians who only wanna hear the Santa and reindeer songs? They clear out early. Things get way too Christian for them. They might go to the downtown bars; otherwise they’re done.
And many of us Christians are fine with Santa songs, but the opening festivities are too crowded and impersonal, and we’d rather check out church booths and say hi to our fellow Christians.
I’ve lived elsewhere, and visited their local Christmas celebrations. Those celebrations weren’t adopted by the local churches. As a result they were mostly about Santa and snowmen and reindeer… and I found ’em pretty dreary and empty, and didn’t go back.
Some years ago I bought
Lewis later developed this idea into a satire, “Xmas and Christmas: A Lost Chapter from Herodotus.” In it, the people of Niatirb (get it?) vigorously celebrate a holiday called Exmas, while the religious folks celebrate an alternate contemporaneous holiday called Crissmas.
I agree with Lewis: It’s super weird to celebrate some other religion’s holiday, yet strip that religion clean out of it. It’s exactly as if pagans took over Hanukkah—and instead of remembering the Maccabees, they invented some guy named Hanukkah Harry who flies round the world and delivers socks.
But weird or not, I don’t wonder why people do it. They do it for the same reason they have sex though they’re not in love; the same reason they take heroin instead of seek
True,