Merry Christmas from The Late Mitchell Warren!
Hello all of you mad Christmas shoppers. Before you beat me to death with a shovel so you can get your grubby hands on that demonic Pleo dinosaur, allow me to give you a very special Christmas greeting. As you know, December 25th marks Christmas Day, otherwise known as Christmastide, otherwise known as Let’s Mock the Death of Christ So We Can Stuff Ourselves Full of Turkey and Eggnog and Buy Our Little Bitchy Cousins the Goddamn Hannah Montana Malibu Beach House-Day. Now far be it from me to be a Grinch, although I can’t say there has ever been a decent movie about Christmas ever made. (Yes Miracle on 34th Street and It’s a Wonderful Life put me to sleep)
What is it about Christmas that we nihilists hate? Is it the fact that Jesus Christ was not actually born anywhere near December, hence the entire concept of Christmas is a sham? No, most historians believe the mystery date of birth of Jesus (estimated to be between the year 7 and 2 B.C.) would have happened much earlier than the month of December. The climate in Israel has been consistent for the last 2,000 years, and today the temperature in Bethlehem remains on average 44 degree Fahrenheit, and very often below freezing level during the night.
Snow-bound weekends are common for Jerusalem and Bethlehem in the months of December and January, and often result in roads becoming unusable and people staying inside their homes. However, bible readers may remember that Luke 2:8, reiterating the birth of Jesus, reads “Now there were in the same country shepherds living out in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night.” This would be highly unlikely if temperatures were dipping around or below 40 degrees. Furthermore, the practice of shepherds keeping their flocks in the field usually commenced in warmer months, from April to October. In cold and rainy months, shepherds took their flocks back home and sheltered them. (Cuz you know those biblical guys just loved animals)
Now how about all of you bastards in baskets out there who claim that we have no idea what the weather was like back in biblical times? Well, no we weren’t there exactly, but we take these things by faith. Besides, in The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, R.B.Y. Scott) it states “weather phenomena and climatic conditions as pictured in the Bible correspond with conditions as observed today.”
Now don’t get your $100 silk panties in a knot just yet. We’re not implying that the December 25th date of Christ’s birth came from somewhere. Why yes, it is a date that can be traced back to 330 A.D. as a practice favored by Roman Christians. You know, the same Romans who murdered Jesus and later started worshiping him. Scholars believe that the link came as the result of the Romans attempting to combine the winter solstice and the Roman festival of Saturnalia into one big Christian-themed orgy.
Say what you will about the Romans and their ability to throw some rocking orgy parties, isn’t it true that Christmas isn’t about dates or ancient religious practices, but about more inspirational things? Like Jesus? Er well, no, not Jesus since he was born sometime earlier in the year, ironically, probably near Halloween. So historically speaking, Christmas has absolutely nothing to do with Jesus besides ancient Roman materialism. No wait, Christmas isn’t about Jesus. Christmas is about love. The love of family and the love of giving.
Yeah right! You’re talking about one of the fixtures of American capitalism. What better way to commemorate the greed of America than to kidnap a bogus religious holiday and stamp Hallmark cards and Baby Jesus memorabilia all over it? Economists say that Christmas in America is worth well over four billion dollars in deadweight loss (a loss of economic efficiency). There is a ridiculous amount of pressure for Americans to spend money they don’t have just to satisfy the lust of amoral credit card companies. Well wait a minute, we’re trying to build our economy back up, right? Isn’t it patriotic to go broke this season just to do our part to heal the recession? Sure it is! This isn’t corporate brainwashing at all…maybe after we empty out our savings account this season we can go out and vote!
Wrong, You Obama-heads! The merchants of America have been running this ploy for centuries. And if you buy Christmas gifts for your sniveling little children then you are celebrating the capitalism and hypocrisy of this great nation of ours. You are blaspheming against Jesus Christ, since any moron knows that it wasn’t really the Messiah’s birthday and that it’s a fictitious holiday introduced by Roman Christ-killers.
Hey, if a bunch of Mitch-heads (ordained followers of the Late Mitchell Warren) decided to celebrate my birthday but did it in March instead of July and didn’t bother writing me, buying me presents or sending me any good wishes, I would fucking kill them. Don’t use my name as an excuse to drench yourself in seminal fluids of your own self-indulgence! And I’m just a humble man. Imagine how pissed Jesus Christ, the Son of God, would be.
Lastly, if you celebrate Christmas then you are doing your part to rape the earth of its natural resources and contribute towards a Republican-sponsored global catastrophe. “What are you talking about, Mitchell? I’m just buying my retarded kids that walking talking demon dinosaur called Pleo! What do I know about global warming?”
You see all of the excess packaging that Christmas constitutes, along with the shitty gifts that you say you love but secretly hate, and all those discarded Wal-Mart paper sacks, do their worst to continue littering the planet. Gifts are made at soulless factories and require giant colossal resources, which slowly but surely microwave the earth with a frosty donut smell. Finite and diminishing natural resources like metal, plastic and wood are required to make these awful Christmas gifts. Cheap plastic (the kind of disposable plastic you so lovingly buy for your children) especially requires high amounts of oil. More energy is wasted and more pollutants fly as people transport these cheap gifts to sweatshops. More trees are cut down not only for Christmas paper lists and stupid greeting cards but also for those incredibly tacky Christmas trees that you simply must put up every single year. Last but not least, all you Christmas-loving Vegans out there can officially freak out: Christmastime results in intensive food production, including the slaughtering of wildlife and the increase in pesticide. How much of this Santa-spawn rubbish will be recycled? Barely 25% of it and the rest of it will be incinerated or dumped in landfill. The more presents you buy the more crap you stuff inside the earth. Looks like someone hasn’t been a good boy, Santa! “Oh well…still more presents for everybody! Ho ho ho!”
Wait a minute, wait a minute. I know I’m leaving someone out here. Ah yes, you religious puritans out there. Well, get your dicks out of that little boy and listen up: did you know the first official Christmas controversy happened way back in the days of the English Interregnum? Puritan Parliament sought to remove the “pagan elements” of Christmas and for a time actually banned Christmas entirely, considering it Roman holiday devoid of any biblical precedent. Even Protestants believed that Christians borrowed from pagan practices, including popular decorations like candles, mistletoe and Christmas trees. Er, come to think of it didn’t Jeremiah 10:3-4 actually say “For the customs of the peoples are false: a tree from the forest is cut down, and worked with an ax by the hands of an artisan. People deck it with silver and gold they fasten it with hammer and nails so that it cannot move”?
But wait! “It’s not about the Christmas greed, you old Scrooge!” (You see, I’m way ahead of you stocking stuffing nannies out there) “It’s about the Christmas spirit!” Yes, the Christmas spirit was clearly on display on Friday, November 28th, 2008 in a Long Island Wal-Mart. On that Black Friday a temp worker named Jdimytai Damour was trampled to death by some 2,000 crazed holiday shoppers looking for a bargain. Who was to blame? Was it the many shoppers who couldn’t contain their Christmas-inspired exuberance? Was it the media who sensationalized Black Friday and Christmas 2008 like professional pornographers? Or was it Wal-Mart who was so excited about raking in the profits for the holiday season, they just forgot about taking extra security measures? Whosever fault it was, that temp worker’s widow wishes you a Merry Christmas, you bunch of assholes.
In closing, what is the big deal? Just because Christmas celebrates the mindless commercialism of American culture, the brutal slaying of nature’s gifts and the lie of Christ’s birth, isn’t it the thought that really counts? Yes, we need one day out of the year to show our family how much we love them. We need at least one day of the year to see those annoying extended family members that we really never see, and sort of wish were dead.
No, seriously, for me Christmas is about the children. I want the future Mitchell Jr. to be comfortable approaching a fat bearded stranger, sit on his lap and tell him what he wants but what his daddy can’t afford. Santa will reply with his exuberant ho ho ho, “Junior, I’ll give you whatever you want if you be a good boy and do what Santa tells you to do!”
Mitchell Jr: Santa? What is that under my butt? It feels hard and pokey.
Santa Claus: HO HO HO! That just means Santa is happy to see you!
Mitchell Jr: Oh…uh okay. I don’t know if I should wish for anything, Santa. The economy is a wreck and I don’t want to contribute to the recession. Besides, my daddy can’t afford to blow three paychecks buying the whole family gifts.
Santa Claus: HO HO HO! I am Santa Claus and I say the economy will turn around! For now, you should just tell me what you want and I will give it to you…that is, if you’ve been a good little boy!
Mitchell Jr: Well, I guess I have…
Santa Claus: And even if you have been a naughty little boy, you can still make Santa very happy by kissing his red-nosed reindeer! HO HO HO!! MERRY CHRISTMAS!!
Mitchell Jr: (Scared) We don’t have a chimney you know!!
Subversify Staff
Well Met. I couldn’t have put it better. This bullcrap has stuck in my craw for a long time. Starting with that inappropriate song in “Santa Clause is Coming to Town.” That goes “If you sit on my lap today..a kiss and a hug is the price you pay.” WTF? How could anybody take their kids to Santa After that?
Talk about taking all the air out of the balloon. If anyone ever wanted to fall into a nostalgic rambling about Christmas past, all snuggled under the tree and exchanging presents, the ambition to do so is killed right here. Maybe we should call it what it really is, National Spending Day to Stimulate our Economy. If we wanted to attach a spiritual significance, we could be celebrating it because it’s comes during the period of the equinox, when the sun starts rolling back, giving us more hours in the day. This may not be a good reason for some who live in the more equatorial zone, but believe me; it’s enough for us in the Arctic regions to want to break out in a celebration or two!
I totally agree!!! People who commercialise Christmas suck! People should be thinking about what it really means. It’s about giving and caring.
“My biggest issue with X-mas: you are LYING to your children.”
This sums it up for me – but it doesn’t go far enough.
People not only lie to their kids – they lie to themselves, too. When you say that ‘most historians’ agree that Jesus was born ‘much earlier than the month of December’, you’re really leaving out a couple of facts.
First, ‘most historians’ don’t agree on Jesus at all. The only ‘historians’ who agree on Jesus even being alive are people like David Barton (who has a degree from a Bible college – which is to say that he might as well have never gone to school at all, being as the only thing he learned was how to pimp his Imaginary Friend).
Real historians point to hard facts – in this case, the fact is that there isn’t a contemporaneous history of the existence, life and times of anyone who lived at that time and did the things he supposedly did – not until a good 70 years after his supposed death.
It wasn’t until Constantine locked disparate factions in a room in the small town of Nicaea (actually, that had to happen twice to get anything done) that there was any agreement at all about the person they called ‘Jesus’.
(The earliest known New Testament – called the Sinai Codex – is missing a whole lot of things. But that, as they say, is another story….)
Christians have been drinking this Kool-Aid for a couple of thousand years now, without much dissent – the pain-of-death edicts of the early Church, which had the force of both government and law, probably had a lot to do with it – but that, too, is another tale.
So, to me, the real mystery is why people are even bothering to discuss the topic of ‘Christmas spirit’ – when the whole damn thing has been based on outright-lies, buggered half-truths, and straight-up asshole fuckery.
Now, with all that said – I don’t ‘hate Christmas’. I can’t hate something in which I’ve not participated since I was thirteen, and which only effect is to slow down the mail a little and keep my customers from working this Friday.
In fact, I love this time of year. My neighbor borrows my ladder to put up his lights – and his kids ask why I don’t go to church like they do:
“Dad”?
“Yes?”
“Uncawill is really a nice guy. Why doesn’t he go to church?”
“Uh – he’s ‘different’.”
“Why?”
“He doesn’t believe there’s a ‘God’.”
“Why?”
“Go see if your Mother needs some help in the kitchen.”
(Or, so I envision it. In reality, I’m changing the world by example.
Sort of like those Christians are supposed to be doing. But that, too, is another tale….)
-W
lol Fair enough, Will. I don’t agree or disagree with that. There is definitely the possibility that Jesus was faked, and a greater possibility that the Messianic prophecy was exaggerated or hoaxed. I would say that at the very least Christianity tries to help people be better in life, as opposed to Christmas which is just a huge illusion, celebrating the worth of people based on material possessions. But then I’m sure you would remind me of all the Christian-brought persecution that the world has suffered. So all I can say is, Merry Day, Will. Merry Day.
here here… Christmas sucks.
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Thanks for this! As I type, it’s 3am on Christmas morn and I’m facing a day of pretending to be happy (“You have to be happy – it’s Christmas!”) while watching other people open gifts that my family struggled to afford (“We have to fork out for presents – it’s Christmas!”) while I struggle to withhold my hatred for whichever ancient Christians decided to tack the birth of their ‘messiah’ onto the existing roman holiday of Saturnalia – which by and large consisted of feasts, orgies and the ritual slaughter of one lucky, lucky roman guy.
At this point, I know which one I’d prefer celebrating, and it’s not the wasteful, expensive, completely-pointless one.
Honestly, between all of the shoved-down-your-throat consumerism and half-baked religious bullshit, I can understand why so many cynics have been turned off to the entire idea of Christmas.
But to me, Christmas is what you make of it. The Christians say it’s all about keeping the spirit of Christ in your heart. The department stores say it’s all about suffocating underneath a massive pile of debt so that you can feel like a good person.
For me, Christmas exists to relive happy childhood memories and to spend a little extra time reminding the important people in my life how much I love them. I don’t necessarily hit up the mall and spend money during the holiday season out of a sense of obligation, but because I truly enjoy giving somebody the perfect gift and seeing the joy on their face when they open it and realize not that I spent oodles of money on them, but that I went out of my way to think of them.
My mother had a very rough childhood and was denied most of the holiday traditions that the majority of us grew up with, and because of that, she always went out of her way to make sure that Christmas was extra-special for her children. Even if we didn’t have a lot of money and only received a few small gifts, we always decorated a beautiful tree, made lots of cookies, watched the classic movies, and drank hot cocoa together. It sounds corny, I know, but to a small child, it means everything.
As I’ve grown older, I’ve become pretty cynical in many aspects of my life, but I will always be a softie when it comes to Christmas. It doesn’t matter to me how hyper-religious or overly commercial the holiday has or will become, because in my heart it is still something pure and magical – and that’s all that matters to me.
So just remember, when you’re hating on the season, that Christmas is what you make of it. You can choose how (or how not) to celebrate it, and you can teach your children the same values. Santa Claus may not be real, but the “Christmas Spirit” is real, if you choose to let it flourish within yourself.
Meh – I prefer Halloween anyway.
To me, this time of year shall forvever be known as “The Day of Commercialism” 0- and my way of commemorating it involves getting a nice bargain on guns and related accessories with which to build the arsenal of me and mine (ironically for the purpose of keeping the establishment that promotes this phony holiday at bay – and said irony is delicious!
).
Mitch, i should have put a drum roll introduction at the top, “Subversify brings to you its most memorable anti-Christmas rant.” This was the top story in our first year of existence, the story that rocked the socks off our first readers and rather surprised staff. It was our first anti-commercial statement.
I won’t lie. I continue to be sucked into the hectic pace of the holiday season, the expenses not truly affordable; but we have scaled down. Would you believe, this year, none of my direct family and extended family members put up a Christmas tree? We did put up a manger scene, though, on a cardboard table, in honor of Latin American tradition. We put the presents under the table and kept calling it the tree, breaking off our reference and laughing as soon as we discovered our mistake.
We also minimized our gift giving. What would have been the most expensive gifts were purchased through e-bay, and yes; a couple of the family members did sneak off to take advantage of the Black Friday specials, but mum is the word because i scored big time because of it. I can be bribed! We also discovered the little ones, far from feeling let down because they didn’t receive a toddler’s computer or remote control robot, were completely delighted with their wooden blocks, plastic punching bag, modeling clay and toy flutes.
Speaking of bribery, i had to muse, after two full days of Christmas celebration, by the end of which i was rendered completely numb and fell asleep during the second viewing of “How to Train a Dragon”, why in the world do we do this each year, when it entails so much stress and labor? Religious ties aside, it’s because it’s fun! I could hardly wait to see the faces of those who i’d bought gifts for and relished every moment of the communion between family and friends. It’s the only real potlach America has; a generally criticized Native American concept by the self gratification-driven society; but a little easier to understand when placed in connection with Christmas tide giving. The biggest difference is that communal sharing via potlach is a way of life among Native American villages, whereas Christmas in America is a once a year thing.