Christmas Season is coming

[Kip Powick]

Well written, probably better than most "scribes" on this forum..

Merry Christmas to all !!!

[dagger]

Now here is something that embodies the true "Christmas spirit"- or should. These people know what most people never learned or can't remember.

http://www.thestar.c...ous-donors?bn=1

At Kmart stores across the country, Santa seems to be getting some help: Anonymous donors are paying off strangers’ layaway accounts, buying the Christmas gifts other families couldn’t afford, especially toys and children’s clothes set aside by impoverished parents.

Before she left the store Tuesday evening, the Indianapolis woman in her mid-40s had paid the layaway orders for as many as 50 people. On the way out, she handed out $50 bills and paid for two carts of toys for a woman in line at the cash register.

“She was doing it in the memory of her husband who had just died, and she said she wasn’t going to be able to spend it and wanted to make people happy with it,” Deppe said. The woman did not identify herself and only asked people to “remember Ben,” an apparent reference to her husband.

[Fido]

From a friend:

[dagger]

So I am guessing that you would have no issue with changing the laws so that turbans can not be worn in the RCMP, or ceremonial daggers brought to school, or Muslim head gear being worn at work in government offices or schools or Jewish symbols of faith being worn in those institutions. You know, since they are all paid for by our taxes.

Canada was founded by Christians (of all sorts) and has a tradition based in that. I see NOTHING wrong making that clear and letting those who chose to move to Canada understand that. Those traditions, for the most part, have become essentially agnostic in the eyes of many. They are Canadian traditions more so than religious ones for a lot of people. So when those traditions get stomped on, as they have been, you can expect some voices to cry out. In fact, Canadians have been amazingly tolerant of this for years as the boundries have been pushed an pushed.

Countries change. The US was founded by a group of elites - some of whom were slaveholders - that promised Liberty and Justice for All (white people). Canada was fashioned from a British colony to be a British dominion, subservient to the Parliament of Westminster, except we threw that off in stages. That's why we may respect the monarch but we don't sing God Save the Queen at hockey games or fly the Union Jack as our national ensign. What we were in 1759 or 1812 or 1841 or 1867 is not what we are today, socially, ethnically, or religiously. In most parts of the country, the Sunday Blue Laws and the Lord's Day Act were abolished and people can actually shop and go to a restaurant on Sunday. Our ethno-religious makeup is a lot more complex today, and should be understood as such because it's one of Canada's great strengths.

[Kip Powick]

DAGGER.......Our ethno-religious makeup is a lot more complex today, and should be understood as such because it's one of Canada's great strengths. No

No one has an issue with your statement but you have sidestepped the thrust of TRADER's Post, specifically..

TRADER.......So I am guessing that you would have no issue with changing the laws so that turbans can not be worn in the RCMP, or ceremonial daggers brought to school, or Muslim head gear being worn at work in government offices or schools or Jewish symbols of faith being worn in those institutions. You know, since they are all paid for by our taxes.

[DEFCON]

"Our ethno-religious makeup is a lot more complex today, and should be understood as such because it's one of Canada's great strengths."

...and unfortunately, also one of Canada's great weaknesses.

[chockalicious]

"Our ethno-religious makeup is a lot more complex today, and should be understood as such because it's one of Canada's great strengths."

...and unfortunately, also one of Canada's great weaknesses.

[Kip Powick]

http://www.cbc.ca/ne...or.html?cmp=rss

Windsor's visiting students hail 'Merry Christmas' on YouTube

International scholars say nothing offensive about holiday expression on campus

Bloody excellent !!!!!! .some of the retailers should take notice !!!

[dagger]

http://fullcomment.n...s-versus-santa/

David Frum on the real Christmas ‘war’: Jesus versus Santa

Tyler Anderson/National Post

We hear a lot about “the war on Christmas.” But the true seasonal struggle is the war within Christmas, a single holiday shared by two deeply antagonistic religions.

Religion 1 is the religion of Jesus Christ, the figure whose birth the holiday commemorates. This religion emphasizes universal grace and forgiveness.

Religion 2 is the religion of Santa Claus, the holiday’s most visible representative. Santa upholds a much sterner creed: “You better watch out / You better not cry / Better not pout / I’m telling you why / Santa Claus is coming to town / He’s making a list / And checking it twice / Gonna find out who’s naughty and nice …”

While Santa is checking his list twice for naughty children to be denied gifts, Jesus rebuked a disciple who asked if he really was expected to forgive an offending brother over and over again. (“Then Peter came up and said to [Jesus], ‘Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?’ Jesus said to him: ‘I do not say to you seven times, but 70 times seven.’ ”)

Santa brings gifts and presents to the good, and denies them to the bad. Jesus, on the other hand, is not nearly so certain about who is good.

In an episode described in the book of John, the scribes and the Pharisees brought to Jesus a woman caught in an act of adultery. “They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, ‘Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?’ They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for punishing the woman.

“But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, ‘If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.’ Again, he stooped down and wrote on the ground.

“At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. Jesus straightened up and asked her, ‘Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?’

“‘No one, sir,’ she said.

“‘Then neither do I condemn you.’"

Santa brings his presents at night, and leaves them to be opened in the morning. Jesus on the other hand warns: “This very night, your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?”

Santa, we are told, is actively hostile to the pouting and crying of small children. In fact, if they want any gifts, they had better not pout or cry at all. Jesus, by contrast, thinks it’s better to have a millstone tied around your neck and to be drowned in the sea than to make a child suffer.

Santa and Jesus do not disagree on everything, of course. Both figures are very tree-positive. Santa lays his gifts under a Christmas tree. Jesus compared the Kingdom of God to a tree that grows from a mustard seed: “What is the Kingdom of God like? To what shall I compare it? It is like a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and put in his own garden. It grew, and became a large tree, and the birds of the sky lodged in its branches.”

But Santa’s tree differs starkly from that cited by Jesus. Jesus chose a scrubby fast-growing plant little valued by commercial farmers. Santa’s preferred tree is a handsome spruce or fir, a legacy from the ancient cults of pre-Christian Germany and Scandinavia.

What is endlessly fascinating to me about TV commentary on the “war in Christmas” is that the commentators most exercised about the subject are themselves almost always adherents of Santa’s religion rather than the religion of Jesus.

What would Jesus say of them? As a matter of fact, Jesus told us what he thought of those who speak most noisily of their devotion to their faith: “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full.”

[Kip Powick]

Hey Dagger....

Eons ago when I was a "newbie" in the RCAF , one of my instructors said to the class......."there are three subjects that are volatile, three subjects that, during a conversation can never be concluded with a decisive end, and three subjects that are open to many interpertations and their discussion can possibly end the most enduring friendship.........religion, politics and sex..... Avoid them at all costs."

While I don't subscribe to his edict in total, at this time of the year I will....

Have a Merry Christmas, don't eat yellow snow, and we'll see you in the New Year !!

[Kip Powick]

[chockalicious]

Good commentary by Frum. Contrast this commentary with the Adler commentary to see who the smarter, more in depth thinker is.

[dagger]

Here's some more food for thought on the so-called War on Christmas

Sarah BarmakSpecial to the Star

In Texas, a fight has erupted over whether to remove a nativity scene from a courthouse. In England, the idea of replacing “Christmas” in some areas with the term “Winterval” has provoked outrage.

Every year, it seems, there is hand-wringing over the so-called “war on Christmas.” Groups disagree over whether it’s a time of religious observance or a commercialized revel.

Yet Queen’s University English professor Heather Evans points out that we’ve been warring over Christmas for centuries. She explains Christmas’s fraught history to the Star.

Do you feel the outcry against the so-called secular war on Christmas is getting more heated?

If anything, that tension between the secular and the sacred is one of the few constants we’ve seen throughout the centuries in relation to Christmas. The Christians in their infancy were an upstart group. Christmas wasn’t initially a feast day, it wasn’t a celebration or a holiday. But at this time of year in Rome, there were several holidays and festivities that were detracting from the spiritual concerns associated with the Christian marking of Christmas. So the Christian church, as it did with many things, kind of appropriated or co-opted the holidays or festivities that were already going on, that had nothing to do with Christ or with the Christian church.

Was there gift giving during this early, more pagan Christmas?

Not really. It was more about feasting and celebrating. One of the characteristics about (Roman festivals) Sol Invictus and Saturnalia, the days preceding it, is that it’s really a period of misrule, a period of topsy-turvy inversion. And (much of) that aspect was maintained in the Christmas festivities in Britain and in much of Europe well into the late Renaissance, even into the 18th century. You have in the Renaissance all kinds of partying and every court, every household, would appoint a “Lord of Misrule” who was a master of the party for the 12 days of Christmas. His job was to stir up the revelry, stir up the disobedience, and play with the idea that this was a time to break from the ordinary routines of our lives. The church didn’t like that aspect, but that’s how people celebrated the day.

So, this debate about whether Christmas is a secular street celebration or a religious holiday is centuries old. How did Christmas re-emerge as a quiet family event in the home?

That was really a 19th-century development. By the beginning of the 19th century, a lot of the Christmas festivities had gone out of fashion. The Puritans completely turned up their noses at the Christmas revelry. They felt it was inappropriate for the occasion. They passed laws against the public celebration of Christmas. Various invested parties in the 1830s, 1840s started to revive interest in Christmas. They were reviving a nostalgic vision of merry old England, a vision that never really existed, but it was attractive — this idea of the family getting together. At this point Britain is getting increasingly urban, so there’s this movement into the cities, into bringing the celebration into the house rather than a public celebration in the streets or in the village.

There wasn’t a lot of gift giving associated with Christmas at all, really. The gift-giving event was New Year’s. Christmas wasn’t declared a bank holiday until 1834. In the late 17th century, when the Puritans had a lot of sway, there were years there when Parliament sat on Christmas Day. It was a workday. And even after it was declared an official holiday in Britain in 1834, a lot of people preferred to take New Year’s as their holiday.

You say that celebrating Christmas has always been bound up with economic status. Can you elaborate?

One of the consequences of these large celebrations is they demarcate the haves from the have-nots. If we look at Christmas celebrations that went on through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the parties were far more extravagant among the aristocratic classes, the moneyed classes. There were costumes to be bought, beer to be bought. Lots of beer to be bought.

So singing carols and a quiet night with the family — that never existed?

Well, that existed among the middle class. So if you have the money to have a household staff to run that, then you do that. It cost a lot to acquire all the accessories to create that kind of scene, to bring in the food, to create all of that glamorous elegance.

What did 19th-century folks do on Boxing Day in the days before shopping malls?

It was a far more charitable (day) than Christmas. It referred to the literal boxes that might be given by a landowner to his workers. Boxes might be given to the poor. By the 19th century those boxes might be given to your household staff. They’d be working like dogs on Christmas Day to support your party, and on Boxing Day they might have a half-day off or a full holiday, and they might be given a little box of money, small tokens, some biscuits or homemade wine.

So this is really a time of year when existing tensions between secular and sacred ways of life rise to a fever pitch.

It’s an occasion also for us to talk about it, and perhaps that’s one of its most interesting aspects. These things were emerging in the newspapers and the magazines and the periodicals in the middle of the 19th century, where people were complaining that it was getting too commercial. It gives us an opportunity as a society to talk about the things we value.

[AME]

Merry Christmas!! to all those who celebrate, and for those that don't, Have a nice Day!!

[Guest]

Christmas may be delayed.LOL