It all started with Saturnalia

Well maybe not exactly, but I've always felt decorating an evergreen tree with lights in the dead of winter to be a powerful symbol of life and harmony and everything that's right about this place we live in.

This lovely article I stumbled across while surfing a cool site linked to the ubiquitous Boingboing has a nice rundown of all the old traditions that show up in modern xxxmasss celebrations. Pagan traditions, i.e. nothing to do w/ Christianity. I don't have a problem with this pagan thing and the word doesn't mean that much to me as I tend to see religion and etc. through the eyes of an anthropologist.

I just like the tree. I like celebrations and what they mean for us, what they symbolize, and the general health they add to our culture- although my friends know I'm a huge bah humbug & passionately hate the commodification of xxxmasss.

I couldn't find out who wrote the article I cite above. The article is on altreligion.about.com, so obviously it's written by someone who doesn't accept the line of shit most churches seem to dole out. This is kind of where my point is here- being sick of so-called Christians having an all-out shitfit about anything that does not match their cafefully sculpted social guidelines and barbwire-fence-encrusted dark ages belief system.

I guess we could agree that Christmas sucks and that the positive side of it all really boils down to spending some time eating with your family and yucking it up a bit around the fireplace, wine-glasses in hand. This kind of gets back to my point here too, that we are all kind of looking for the same things and we are capable of coming together, generally speaking, rather than being divided, but tolerance is lacking these days, and it seems some wealthy and powerful people these days (I call them NeoCons) don't want us coming together and agreeing on anything at all.

So in other words, when your neighbor has a Paris Hilton shrine in his yard with a manger where the baby Jesus is reprsented by a Paris Hilton's pet monkey, or better yet by "Kevin" from South Park (!!) (also see the excitement about this South Park episode that was apparently cancelled due to its outrageous funniness), laugh. Realize that the U.S. is not a christian nation, it's a nation where you should participate, and not shove your religion down other people's throats. You can make fun of me sitting in the desert reading Zen Buddhism all you want, and don't throw a shitfit when a cartoon makes fun of your own stupid religion.