A White F#@$king Christmas!

As you may have heard, a nasty blizzard is blowing through Colorado. For me this means two things:

1) Losing two days of work due to a snow closure (which is unpaid, since I'm a contractor).
2) Not being able to fly out of here to see my girlfriend over the Christmas weekend because Denver International Airport has been shut down.

So Mr. Lias is not having a very merry Xmas at the moment, although I suppose it could be worse. I have a friend who not only wasn't able to fly out to see her family, but she also learned, just a few days ago, that she's going to be losing her job.

As soon as the roads clear, I think I'll be going out and getting an extra large carton of eggnog and some spiced rum. I can at least drown my sorrows in a seasonally appropriate manner.

A Mitvah for Christmas

I know that there is a statute of limitations for posts relating to Christmas, but I didn't find today's site until just yesterday, so please pardon one final Christmas link.

Akiva and Ilene Miller wondered what Christmas would be like if it were a Jewish celebration. In particular, they wondered what the mitzvah (i.e., laws) of the celebration would look like.

The site also has some "traditional" Jewish Christmas songs including "Hagada for Christmas" which is about "the fruitcake of our affliction, which our ancestors baked 400 years ago".

Enjoy.

Merry XBox... or summtin' like that

I assume that, by now, all of you are aware that I've been waging war on Christmas.

Honestly, it came as something of a surprise to me. All these years I just considered Christmas to be another one of those Holidays that people celebrate as they will whether or not they think about what it's supposed to represent (a bit like Memorial Day which, contrary to most people's impressions, isn't a celebration of three day weekends and barbecues).

Yes, I was aware that, for a fair number of people, the day had religious significance. That never especially bothered me since the actual parts that interested me, such as gift giving, the Christmas tree, and so forth, weren't closely tied to religion (unless you want to go back to the ancient pagans, at least). It seemed like a perfectly reasonable sort of arrangement.

Lately though, I've been told (mainly by Fox news) that the forces of secularism (which is where I get drafted into this nonsense) have been trying to destroy the Christian version of Christmas. I assumed that this had to do with nativity chreches since that's long been the seasonal point of contention between secularists (and Jews, and Jehovas Witnesses, and Christian liberals, etc) and the self-appointed defenders of Christianity.

Honestly, though, I had thought that the courts had done a fairly decent job of working that controversy out with a general prescription that says that you can't put displays on public land that are solely for the promotion of a religion but, if you want to have a nativity, it could be fine if you place it in the general context of a secular celebration of the season. It's one of those compromise solutions that doesn't make anyone quite happy, which is often the nature of a good compromise.

It turns out that's not what Fox is on about, though. And least not entirely, since they do mention the whole creche controversy as being part of the War on Christmas. It seems that what really steams their stockings is the phrase "happy holidays". Although I've never really been conscious about what sort of semi-sincere seasonal greetings I've been offering, I'm sure that I have said the dreaded double-H every now and again (thus waging war on Christmas). Heck, I'm pretty sure that I've even suggested that people have a good Solstice now and again. Of course the fact that I am, indeed, an atheist automatically makes me one of the warriors in the battle. Even when I do say "merry Christmas" it can be assumed that I am merely trying to infiltrate my way into the ranks of the good and decent so that I may further subvert them.

So, since it's apparent that I am, in fact, waging war against Christmas, I would like to beg a favor of the government. In keeping with the tradition of all the other wars on things (drugs, terrorism, jaywalkers, etc), I think that it would only be fair to grant me unlimited powers of search and seizure, the ability to arbitrarily arrest and detain people without oversight, and the ability to surveyal my enemies (real and imagined) without restriction. Seems only far.

So heads up, Christian America! I'll know when you are sleeping, I'll know when you're awake...

(And a very happy set of holidays, however you may celebrate them [or not], to all my loyal readers. Do take care.)

Ding Dong!

In the United States, one of the traditional sounds of Christmas is the ringing of the bells of Salvation Army workers. These folks generally position themselves in front of major department stores and restaurants, next to a small, suspended pot, and ring their bells in the hopes that passers-by will deposit some change in the pots.

Recently, some retailers have threatened to deny these workers the right to do so in front of their stores under the theory that the ringing distracts their customers from the more important task of shopping. Generally, such efforts lend themselves to very bad publicity with the typical result being that the retailers eventually retreat from their position.

I saw an interesting permutation of this ongoing issue while shopping yesterday. A Salvation Army worker had set himself up in front of a Kmart; however, instead of ringing a bell, he had a small sign on a stick with the words "DING" on one side and "DONG" on the other. Holding the stick between his hands, he would rub his hands back and forth causing the sign to alternate between its two sides.

I am reminded of the aphormism that compromise is the act whereby neither of two sides in a dispute get what they want, leaving both equally unhappy.

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As a follow up, it gets stranger. According to an article I found on Yahoo! News , in some places, the Salvation Army havn't merely replaced the bells, but have replaced the actual bell ringers with cardboard cut-outs.