Thank you for unlocking this. It's interesting and very thinky-inducing.
I'm slowly unpacking what defensiveness I, as a practicing Christian, have about Christmas.
I don't find that I feel defensive about the religious aspects at all. I go to church, where nobody who doesn't want to hear about Jesus is likely to be. As far as public life I'd prefer to live by the Word than preach it, so I'm mostly inoffensive in that regard, I think. :)
The whole greeting thing - I just smile at people a whole lot in December. If they wish me a Happy Anything I say "thanks, you too."
A little sad, occasionally, that I'm the only person in my immediate family for whom Christmas IS a religious holiday, but, you know, I am Yule friendly. We make it work.
(I'm fundamentally Hanukkah friendly too, but it's not the sort of thing that people invite their Christian friends to, you know?)
I'm very defensive of having lots of pine trees around and hanging lights on everything. I justify this by saying that I live in Ottawa where it gets dark at 4pm in December and is miserably cold and we NEED many coloured lights, but maybe I am kidding myself.
The thing I think I find the hardest not to be defensive of is that I have a sort of fear of ... social blankness, if that makes any sense. I tend to be radical in my politics and traditional in my tastes, you know?
And basically, the older a Western tradition is the more likely it is to be indefensible on some level or another. Which sucks, really; it would be great beyond words if we had traditions that didn't have that legacy, but we don't, really. And that feels insoluble to me, because I'm very wary of saying "well, let's throw it all out then."
(Another aspect of my defensiveness, actually, though I don't know how widespread this is, comes from dealing not with people of other faiths but from people who culturally were raised Christian, who aren't now, who a) loathe Christmas with the heat of a million suns, b) can't leave the topic alone, and c) assume that I am one of them. Especially as d) despite that they're the ones who are most prone to go on about the materialism, commercialisation, and meaninglessness of Christmas, they're the people least likely to be gracious if you happen to give them a present that doesn't quite suit them. This is relevant only in that I often suspect that quite a lot of the tension around this gets exported unconsciously into the ongoing debate about cultural sensitivity.)
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I'm slowly unpacking what defensiveness I, as a practicing Christian, have about Christmas.
I don't find that I feel defensive about the religious aspects at all. I go to church, where nobody who doesn't want to hear about Jesus is likely to be. As far as public life I'd prefer to live by the Word than preach it, so I'm mostly inoffensive in that regard, I think. :)
The whole greeting thing - I just smile at people a whole lot in December. If they wish me a Happy Anything I say "thanks, you too."
A little sad, occasionally, that I'm the only person in my immediate family for whom Christmas IS a religious holiday, but, you know, I am Yule friendly. We make it work.
(I'm fundamentally Hanukkah friendly too, but it's not the sort of thing that people invite their Christian friends to, you know?)
I'm very defensive of having lots of pine trees around and hanging lights on everything. I justify this by saying that I live in Ottawa where it gets dark at 4pm in December and is miserably cold and we NEED many coloured lights, but maybe I am kidding myself.
The thing I think I find the hardest not to be defensive of is that I have a sort of fear of ... social blankness, if that makes any sense. I tend to be radical in my politics and traditional in my tastes, you know?
And basically, the older a Western tradition is the more likely it is to be indefensible on some level or another. Which sucks, really; it would be great beyond words if we had traditions that didn't have that legacy, but we don't, really. And that feels insoluble to me, because I'm very wary of saying "well, let's throw it all out then."
(Another aspect of my defensiveness, actually, though I don't know how widespread this is, comes from dealing not with people of other faiths but from people who culturally were raised Christian, who aren't now, who a) loathe Christmas with the heat of a million suns, b) can't leave the topic alone, and c) assume that I am one of them. Especially as d) despite that they're the ones who are most prone to go on about the materialism, commercialisation, and meaninglessness of Christmas, they're the people least likely to be gracious if you happen to give them a present that doesn't quite suit them. This is relevant only in that I often suspect that quite a lot of the tension around this gets exported unconsciously into the ongoing debate about cultural sensitivity.)