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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (57934)	12/29/2000 10:40:41 PM
From: JF Quinnelly	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71178

No, I just wasn't especially interested in pursuing it. This all started with me calling Piekoff a fool. Here's what the URL you posted says: " Christmas should be more commercial. Contrary to lore, this holiday was established by Americans to celebrate worldly goods and happiness. It was taken over by Christianity." ".Santa Claus is a thoroughly American invention. There was a St. Nicholas long ago and a feeble holiday connected with him (on December 5)." "All the best customs of Christmas, from carols to trees to spectacular decorations, have their root in pagan ideas and practices. These customs were greatly amplified by American culture, as the product of reason, science, business, worldliness, and egoism, i.e., the pursuit of happiness." I'll go over it again: Santa is an amalgam of Dutch, German, and English traditions, like Father Christmas and Sinter Klaas that long predate Clement Moore. Christmas trees were known at least as far back as Martin Luther, pre 1550. The custom of evergreens as decoration in churches and homes at Christmas goes back much farther than that. A good number of Christmas Carols, if not the majority, were written as Carols by the likes of Luther and Bach. An Austrian pastor wrote Silent Night. Gift giving predates The Industrial Revolution- your own Williamsburg source mentioned ads for gifts in Colonial Williamsburg. If Piekoff was saying that Christmas traditions have been exaggerated and exploited by mass merchandisers for their own benefit I wouldn't have called him a fool. But that's not what he's saying, which is unsurprising since his idol Ayn Rand despised religion and worshipped capitalism. He's clearly claiming that none of these practices existed as Christmas traditions. You want to second his claim? Here's Piekoff's summation for those who missed it: America's tragedy is that its intellectual leaders have typically tried to replace happiness with guilt by insisting that the spiritual meaning of Christmas is religion and self-sacrifice for Tiny Tim or his equivalent. But the spiritual must start with recognizing reality. Life requires reason, selfishness, capitalism; that is what Christmas should celebrate — and really, underneath all the pretense, that is what it does celebrate. It is time to take the Christ out of Christmas, and turn the holiday into a guiltlessly egoistic, pro-reason, this-worldly, commercial celebration.