merry christmas!

[wavyarms]

In light of the recent Fox News reports about attacks on Christmas, I present to you The Christian Privilege checklist. I disagree with 12 and 24 (both in NJ and MA) but in general it's good food for thought.

The only one missing is: "If I am a classical musician, I can assume that almost the entire western canon is based upon texts of my religion."

I shall now go do some X-mas shopping. :)

In other news, thomascantor had his final graduate recital yesterday, and it was great. Very good, very interesting concert. Special kudos to sen_no_ongaku for his piece, which was extremely effective. I look forward to the recording!

Also, I'm briefly in Boston right now, but not for very long. If I don't run into you, I'll be back for a nice long 3-week stretch starting Christmas Eve, so not to fret!

[EDIT: Since that privilege checklist was so popular, here is a link to a whole bunch more.]

Comments

[wavyarms.livejournal.com]

OK, I stand corrected. :)

However, (to nit-pick) if Christmas is just a big winter solstice celebration, and merely overlaid on top of older religions, how come we don't celebrate summer solstice?

I think religions that adopt older religions for their purposes only adopt the parts that are useful (i.e. overlapping) and disregard others. It's interesting how that affects the religions being adopted, even by those practitioners who stick to their original beliefs (i.e. Judaism and Hanukkah.) And even if there are similarities, I think the calendar would look very different if any Native American religion had been dominant for the past 500 years. (As would the map.)

[minyan.livejournal.com]

how come we don't celebrate summer solstice?

Agreed. But we do have a summer holiday — it's political, rather than religions, but it happens to fll at the warmest and brightest time of year, and we celebrate it with ripe fruit and summer greens and young fowl and fresh salmon...

Maybe its a coincidence that the 4th of July stuck in the claendar in wyas that Veterans Day or D-Day have't. And maybe its a coincidence that we celebrate strawberry season with shortcake festivals and bazaars, and the Mohicans had an early summer strawberry festival. I think we tend to want to celebrate the seasons of the year in one way or another, and we don't just swipe each other's holidays: if our traditions don't give us a holiday when the rhythms of the year suggest one, then we find one somewhere.