Christmas, Behind the Hymn

I note this week a fella at the fundamentalist church I used to attend who'd say, every year, at this time, "Santa re-arranged spells Satan." He was one of 'the reason for the season' men.

He's not alone. An AP article by Tom Breen draws attention to folks like Pastor John Foster in Charleston, West Virginia, who says, "People don't think of it this way, but it's really a secular holiday," and Clyde Kilough, President of the United Church of God, who opines "The theological question is quite simple: Is it acceptable to God for humans to choose to worship him by adopting paganism's most popular celebration and calling them Christian?" Breen adds, "In colonial New England, this disapproval extended to actually making the holiday illegal, with celebration punishable by a fine."

How does one go from chuckling at the man, with a belly like jelly, to Satan? Now, if some different fundamentally-minded folk had their way, Christmas wouldn't be illegal, or ascribed to the devil, rather, it'd be illegal not to "recognize the importance of Christmas and the Christmas faith," 'as a House resolution recently recognized - though not without dissenters, as the Family Research Council (FRC) pointed out (Democrats, by name; one lonely Republican, identity withheld).

I'm confused - are we damned if we do, and damned if we don't? I made it a point never to attend office Christmas parties after a Director lectured it was good for business to attend. Could even I be a closet reason-for-the-season man?

Maybe I can't make sense of it because what I'm hearing and reading appears to omit certain things that my brain instinctively attempts to make whole. An editorialist on the local rag, for one, recently gushed with admiration for Jim Dobson, the founder of the above-cited FRC, who "will always be the man who taught me to parent." Fair enough if that works for her. However, when she writes, "This was a man, I realized, who took his faith seriously, whose care for the smaller, weaker members of society was evident," my cerebral cortex cries foul.

This is the point where my mind insists on filling a hole, patching a leak, mortaring the cracks - is the special care reserved for 'smaller, weaker members of society,' only if they're children of families deemed legitimate, natural, or, 'traditional,' in FRC-talk? What if what's protected, exclusively, then, has intended or unintended consequences which creates discrimination or persecution by default for 'smaller, weaker members of society' who don't fit within the restricted, glorified, mold; which is indirectly acknowledged, but lightly dismissed, with, "Sometimes it takes a little noise on the battlefield to get the job done." Noise? Battlefield? Parenting is war? Battlefields produce casualties. Who are they? What's the allowable range and extent of their wounds?

Injuries aren't always overt. I was initially attracted to an editorial by M.J. Andersen entitled "Elder Care >> The Benefits of Staying Home," about "a new program called Choices for Care allowing government dollars to pay for home care rather than nursing homes," since I'm likely on that road myself sooner than I'd like to think, when, like the burst of a shell on another battlefield, Andersen writes, "Gay elderly people who have felt themselves shunned in traditional nursing homes - and sometimes packed off to live with the severely disabled - are finding more adult facilities specifically geared toward them." Elderly gay folk categorized, segregated, severely disabled? Classifications of this sort sound depressingly familiar. Where is such everyday evil instilled, perpetuated, generation after generation? Parenting class?

Whether theologically correct, or not; Christian or non, Christmas holds a power that exceeds, even suspends, logic. A letter to the editor, a week ago, tapped into it. Carolyn R. Jones-Kelly, an inmate at the Rappahannock Regional Jail, writes about "some pretty heartless crimes I'd committed. I've talked bad about good people, stolen their property, and just generally violated every honor code imaginable." She continues, "Now that my trials are over, I'd like to publically apologize. I've accepted my guilt and have worked my way into understanding just how much hurt I've caused people, some I don't know and others I care very much about." Through the recognition of her 'heartlessness,' and acknowledgement of consequences, to those known and unknown, she elegantly patches the holes in the logic leaking from the Dobson portrayal; plus aren't we inclined, to grant Carolyn the benefit of the doubt, and accept her apology, more at Christmas time, as opposed to say, on July 4th?

There's a tradition in the family I married into where holidays and birthdays are celebrated together regardless of the distance required to overcome the absence. On the three and a half hour drive home from the Shenandoah Valley, after eating dinner at the sister-in-law's, I spotted a rusting, decrepit tin trailer off the side of the road, festooned with Christmas lights, hung from every conceivable angle, not to mention the plastic blow-up Santa's in the yard. No matter their theology, this was a house that hadn't given up hope.

The Roman orator Tacitus is famous for saying, "They make a desert and they call it peace." There are those that'd make a desert out of Christmas by likening Santa to Satan, or passing laws that enforce their own reason for the season, so that others of not like mind are shunned and abandoned to a lonely solitude.

The power of Christmas, whether religious or secular, stands in their way, like an unexpected plea for mercy from a prisoner, or an amazing ramshackle trailer, in the middle of nowhere, that illuminates the dark, as did a Star, one December night, two thousand years ago.