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Merry Christmas, etc.

Today, someone at the hardware store said, almost aggressively, “Merry Christmas.”

It took me a few minutes to remember (so, unfortunately, they got away) that “cancel culture stopping us from saying ‘Merry Christmas'” is a deep matter of national concern in some sectors. Personally, I’d be worried about drones in New Jersey, or capitalists exporting remaining good jobs, but – OK, sure, let’s talk about that.

(MidJourney AI and mjr)

My specialty is definitely not UK history, so I hope I get this right. I did a little research but I’m mostly going from memory. There’s loads of information about it on the web. [ials] But christmas was actually canceled, once upon a time. In the UK, in 1647. And, it actually stayed canceled for 400 years or so. When the laws against christmas were first passed, it was actually enforced, but eventually became part of the zeitgeist, and the Scots celebrated Hogmanay, e.g.: New Year’s. Unexpectedly, the reason christmas was canceled was not (supposedly) a typical christian attempt to suppress old pagan holidays, but rather because it was, you know, a party and celebration and offensive to the christian Fun Police.

[ials]

In London the military were reported to be patrolling the streets and seizing any items they believed to be used to celebrate Christmas. Town criers walked the streets calling “No Christmas, No Christmas”.

The ban was very unpopular: riots took place in some major cities, including Ipswich where it is reported that one person died.

The ban remained in place for 13 years until 1600 when When King Charles II returned to power and one of his first acts was to repeal all the anti-Christmas legislation, helping foster his image as the “Merry Monarch”.

… apparently god did not approve of the repeal, ‘cuz he fucked King Charles up pretty severely. Eating mince pies on December 25 could result in imprisonment, though doubtless there were stealthy pies eaten, and probably secret networks of pie eaters. Christmas was not restored to being on the official list of holidays until 1958.

As an atheist and general shrugger-at of religions, I’m always a bit amused by these things. Religion’s value as a tool for social control is never more apparent than when they are anathematizing eachother or purging or crusading or whatever god’s love demands at this particular juncture. Remember that, in principle, these people believe in a relentlessly vengeful god who is perfectly capable of omnisciently identifying the mince pie eaters for eternal punishment – there is no need for the government to get involved. Unless, perhaps, the government is just looking for something to control.

Of course that requires Emo Philips’ “golden gate bridge” joke, which won “best joke about religion” for years, but only because the christians couldn’t “do a Jan Huss on him.” The Fun Police really hate when you poke fun at them, especially when their body cameras are turned on.

As I search for a way to end this posting, I realize that it’s been quite a while since I had anything to say about religion, anyway. In my mind, it’s a dead issue and has been one for a long time. Remember when we used to have the big wars and whatnot over atheism, and those writers were all writing books about what a load of horseshit faith is? Was that even necessary? When they achieve power, they seem to be unable to keep from flexing it (the object of power is power, per Orwell) and proving once again that they should be kept away from power. Now that Trump is coming into office again (I kick myself: did that really happen? WTF!?) the religious wing of the fascist party will attempt to soil itself by pushing prayer and religious observances into the public square. It will become a shit-show, of course, because if it succeeds they will immediately fall again to squabbling over which of the 1,271 variants of christianity gets to stand in the spotlight. All we have to do is stand back and ask politely, “which observance?” No need to bring the satanists into the picture, at all. If you want to see christians pause and scratch their ${whatevers} in puzzlement you can ask “which version of the ten commandments?” and then mention that the one they think they know was written by a jewish hollywood director (Cecil B. DeMille) and significantly shortened so it could fit on some wooden props for Charleton Heston to carry in his role of Moses. Listen, guys, before you decide to put the ten commandments in public, maybe you should decide which ones you’re in favor of. And maybe you should drop the commandments that the president of the USA has ruthlessly violated, i.e.: most of them.

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Comments

  4. markp8703 says

    As far as I know you’re right about the UK’s Christmas cancellation. (In much of the national press it still gets cancelled each year, but nobody can detect any actual cancellation.)

    Re. the Emo Philips joke: I think it was voted best religious joke by the Christian website “Ship of Fools”.

    It’s a great joke.

  5. kestrel says

    I love that Emo Philips joke, and once got to see him do it in person.

    Also, now I will spend the rest of the day worrying about what happened to Santa’s left leg.

  6. fusilier says

    IINM, most of the Ten Commandments monuments on statehouse lawns were from DeMille promoting that movie. Here in Indianapolis, at least, the Knights of Columbus were involved in the ceremony.

    About 10 yers ago, a fellow vandalized the monument, i.e. he went after it with an 8-pound sledge.

    He was a fundigelical preacher who objected to the _CATHOLIC_ sequence.

    fusilier

    James 2:24

  7. Owlmirror says

    Something is very wrong here.

    The ban remained in place for 13 years until 1600 when When King Charles II returned to power

    1) “When” occurs twice
    2) 1600 is before 1647, not after
    3) Charles II wasn’t even born in 1600

    I have to assume that “1600” is a typo for “1660”, but that’s a hell of a mistake in such a brief webpage. Is there nothing better?

    But christmas was actually canceled, once upon a time. In the UK, in 1647. And, it actually stayed canceled for 400 years or so.

    Where the heck do you get that 400 years from? After 1660, no-one was cancelling Christmas for the public (obviously, Puritan-minded believers canceled Christmas for themselves)

    Eating mince pies on December 25 could result in imprisonment, though doubtless there were stealthy pies eaten, and probably secret networks of pie eaters.

    Nope nope nope.

    https://www.cromwellmuseum.org/cromwell/did-oliver-cromwell-ban-christmas

    As an aside, the Christmas bans never included any mention of the banning of Mince Pies, which at the time were made with real meat and not specifically associated with the festive season (often also served at weddings). They were only proscribed by implication for Christmas 1644 (as it was a fast day) – otherwise the popular stories that they were banned by Cromwell are yet another Christmas myth!

  8. Owlmirror says

    Puritan-minded believers canceled Christmas for themselves

    Philip Henry Gosse, who wrote “Omphalos”, was of the Plymouth Brethren, which was such a sect (not to suggest that it directly derived from Puritanism). His son Edmund wrote of his father’s reaction to Christmas (published 1907, of an event in 1857 when Edmund was 8)

    https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2540/pg2540-images.html

    On the subject of all feasts of the Church he held views of an almost grotesque peculiarity. He looked upon each of them as nugatory and worthless, but the keeping of Christmas appeared to him by far the most hateful, and nothing less than an act of idolatry. ”The very word is Popish,” he used to exclaim, “Christ’s Mass!” pursing up his lips with the gesture of one who tastes assafoetida by accident. Then he would adduce the antiquity of the so-called feast, adapted from horrible heathen rites, and itself a soiled relic of the abominable Yule-Tide. He would denounce the horrors of Christmas until it almost made me blush to look at a holly-berry.

    [ . . . the servants, not sharing this view, do some discreet Christmas celebration, including baking a treat, which one of them thinks to share with young Edmund . . . ]

    I ate a slice of plum-pudding. Shortly I began to feel that pain inside which in my frail state was inevitable, and my conscience smote me violently. At length I could bear my spiritual anguish no longer, and bursting into the study I called out: “Oh! Papa, Papa, I have eaten of flesh offered to idols!” It took some time, between my sobs, to explain what had happened. Then my Father sternly said: “Where is the accursed thing?” I explained that as much as was left of it was still on the kitchen table. He took me by the hand, and ran with me into the midst of the startled servants, seized what remained of the pudding, and with the plate in one hand and me still tight in the other, ran till we reached the dust-heap, when he flung the idolatrous confectionery on to the middle of the ashes, and then raked it deep down into the mass. The suddenness, the violence, the velocity of this extraordinary act made an impression on my memory which nothing will ever efface.

  9. Reginald Selkirk says

    Personally, I’d be worried about drones in New Jersey,…

    I’m not overly worried about that. I acknowledge some of the reports might actually have been drones, but after the initial reports people started going outside and looking up. And many of them could not identify the lights they saw in the sky. Including stars

    A community note appended to Hogan’s original tweet notes that the “stars at the 39-second mark are recognizably the constellation Orion.”

    And also conventional aircraft. Including one recorded by a Fox & Friends host. You can clearly see the red and green navigation lights blinking. The landing lights were also on, so this jet was probably coming in for a landing at Newark. She claims it was at a height of “about 100 yards”, and yet it is so distant that it is partially obscured by atmospheric haze. Size and distance are linked, so if you get one wrong your estimate of the other is likely to be way off.

    And also this.
    Drone Fears Causing Binge Of Laser Strikes On Aircraft

  11. springa73 says

    It’s well known to historians that the original “war on Christmas” was waged by some groups of Christians against others. In my state of Massachusetts, settled by English puritans, celebrating Christmas was, I believe, illegal into the 18th century and strongly frowned upon well into the 19th, being viewed as a “papist” (Roman Catholic) holiday. There’s an interesting book called, iirc, The Battle for Christmas, about how through the course of the 19th century, celebrating Christmas became respectable to the majority of US Protestants, and how the focus of the celebration shifted from feasting and drinking to gift-giving, which paved the way for the massive commercialization of the 20th century.

  12. Pierce R. Butler says

    Raise a glass to (or click for) the satirical early masterworks of James Morrow, including Bible Stories for Adults, Towing Jehovah, and, for seasonal schlock synchronicity, Only Begotten Daughter.

  13. Bekenstein Bound says

    On the subject of all feasts of the Church he held views of an almost grotesque peculiarity. He looked upon each of them as nugatory and worthless, but the keeping of Christmas appeared to him by far the most hateful, and nothing less than an act of idolatry. ”The very word is Popish,” he used to exclaim, “Christ’s Mass!” pursing up his lips with the gesture of one who tastes assafoetida by accident. Then he would adduce the antiquity of the so-called feast, adapted from horrible heathen rites, and itself a soiled relic of the abominable Yule-Tide. He would denounce the horrors of Christmas until it almost made me blush to look at a holly-berry.

    Yeah, yeah, yeah … when do we get to the good bit, when he is visited by the three ghosts? :)

  14. Reginald Selkirk says

    This movie exists

    Anything But Christmas
    (2021)

    Just days before Christmas, a Kentucky State Representative proposes a bill to change the holiday’s name from Christmas to something more inclusive. It is presented as the Holiday Bill, but if they change the name, what will they call it? No one seems to know, just Anything BUT Christmas.

    Some suggestions: Saturnalia, Winter Solstice, Yuletide, The Mid-Winter Holiday, Dongzhi, Yalda, Soyal, Newtonmas. Or here’s a wild idea: Everyone could choose their own holiday to celebrate. I challenge you to find a human culture which does not observe the winter solstice.

    Nick (Santa) sends one of his most trusted elves, Bartholomew Decoris, to Kentucky to hire a legal team to defend Christmas and bring suit against the Commonwealth of Kentucky to stop the vote on this bill.

    Why on Earth would they try to stop the vote? Don’t they realize that this bill wouldn’t get passed in any U.S. state, let alone Kentucky?

    The attorney representing Christmas (Beth) is struggling with her own feelings about the holiday. This case forces her to face her past and deal with both her childhood memories of Christmas and the new traditions she must build with her teenage daughter shortly after a heartbreaking divorce. —Bobby Lacer

    This looks like the old “atheists are mad at God because something bad happened to them” trope.

  15. birgerjohansson says

    Mr Garrison sings…
    “Hello, mister Shintoist,
    Merry f*cking christmas”
    (South Park)
    There are other christmas- related South Park episodes, far more gross than this.

  16. Tethys says

    Coincidentally, a fashion historian on YouTube just posted a video about the ‘war on Xmas’ and the silly idea that saying Merry Xmas is a modern political issue pushed by wokeness gone wild lefties.

    Spoiler, merry is code for drunken debauchery and has been since the Angles and Saxons sailed over to Brittania with the Yule tradition. The drinking was the reason later king type people tried to ban the holiday altogether. Children drunk on gin was socially unremarkable back in the days of Dickens.

    Hope your holiday is safely merry !

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zzQ64FgLhZM

  17. says

    kestrel@#5:
    Also, now I will spend the rest of the day worrying about what happened to Santa’s left leg.

    Budget cuts have really hit public entitlements like christmas presents and ho, ho, ho

  18. says

    Tethys@#16:
    Children drunk on gin was socially unremarkable back in the days of Dickens.

    If I remember my Hogarth, gin was considered a form of baby sitter.

    One of the local “bottom shelf” distilleries has started making a grenadine-flavored vodka that really does have the power to make christmas bearable.

  19. says

    Reginald Selkirk@#14:
    Some suggestions: Saturnalia, Winter Solstice, Yuletide, The Mid-Winter Holiday, Dongzhi, Yalda, Soyal, Newtonmas

    I see a problem, which is that it’s unrealistic to expect a Kentucky representative to be able to spell any of those.

    It is currently available on Ebay for $3.99. Apparently it’s a big hit that nobody watches every never so often!

  20. says

    Reginald Selkirk@#10:
    Weird “biblically accurate” angels are the viral Christmas design trend of 2024

    Yes!
    Imagine my shock when I learned that the angels in Neon Genesis Evangelion were not run of the mill anime sci fi enemies.
    There have been a lot of times when I dig into various nut cellars in christianity and wonder what the fuck they were on or, more likely, how much paranoid schizophrenia there was in the early christian propagandists. A lot of it is positively Lovecraftian, just avoids the word “foetid” better.

  21. Reginald Selkirk says

    @19 It’s available for free on tubitv.com, but obviously I wasn’t recommending it. If someone wants to “take one for the team,” at least it won’t cost them anything. I wouldn’t watch the movie, but I would read a reasonably short review.

    @16, 18
    “If I remember my Hogarth, gin was considered a form of baby sitter.”
    There was an episode of I Love Lucy in which Lucy gets very drunk on the false notion that “gin” is short for “ginger ale.”

  22. Owlmirror says

    After 1660, no-one was cancelling Christmas for the public

    I should have qualified that with “in Great Britain”. As springa73 states, the Puritans in the New World did indeed cancel Christmas for the public at large. Although “illegal into the 18th century” appears to be a misremembering of a more complicated situation..

    https://www.massmoments.org/moment-details/christmas-celebration-outlawed.html

    in 1659, a law was passed by the General Court of Massachusetts Bay Colony requiring a five-shilling fine from anyone caught “observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way.” [ . . .] The law was repealed in 1681 along with several other laws, under pressure from the government in London. It was not until 1856 that Christmas Day became a state holiday in Massachusetts. For two centuries preceding that date, the observance of Christmas — or lack thereof — represented a cultural tug of war between Puritan ideals and British tradition.

  23. snarkhuntr says

    The editor in chief of Christianity Today is warning that evangelical Christianity is moving too far to the right, to the point that even Jesus’s teachings are considered “weak” now.

    Russell Moore resigned from the Southern Baptist Convention in 2021, after years of being at odds with other evangelical leaders. Specifically, Moore openly criticized Donald Trump, whom many evangelical Christians embraced. Moore also criticized the Southern Baptist Convention’s response to a sexual abuse crisis and increasing tolerance for white nationalism in the community.

    Now he thinks his religion is in crisis.

    Moore told NPR in an interview released Tuesday that multiple pastors had told him they would quote the Sermon on the Mount, specifically the part that says to “turn the other cheek,” when preaching. Someone would come up after the service and ask, “Where did you get those liberal talking points?”

    “What was alarming to me is that in most of these scenarios, when the pastor would say, ‘I’m literally quoting Jesus Christ,’ the response would not be, ‘I apologize.’ The response would be, ‘Yes, but that doesn’t work anymore. That’s weak,’” Moore said. “When we get to the point where the teachings of Jesus himself are seen as subversive to us, then we’re in a crisis.”

    Moore said he thinks a large part of the issue is how divisive U.S. politics

    Source: New The New Republic

    I sense a Schism! Let’s ring the gong and add another tick to the “# of versions of the one-true-religion” counter.

    Well actually, several schisms. There are endless flavours of anti-woke jesus floating around already and have been for quite some time. I assume that Moore is really decrying that these versions are becoming more popular with the kinds of people he wants to see remaning as believers/tithers to his own version of segregation-loving and pro-pedophile Southern Baptist sect.

    Religions change and grow – because they’re not based on any underlying truth or facts, they are free to adapt to local conditions. So in the US you have gun-churches now. The ‘War on Christmas’ is such a fundamental religious belief of christians that they actually make movies about a thing that’s never happened. Much like earlier v,ersions of the faith put on Passion Plays or had elaborate parades to celebrate the fictional death and resurrection of the fictional jesus

    This time every year I do notice that some people say “Merry Christmas” with a kind of expectant edge – as if they are looking for an argument from whoever they say it to. It must be quite tiring being so angry all the time.

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