| December 24, 2003 The Washington Post and me --Well, the most substantial published work of mine will occur this Saturday, December 27, 2003. The Washington Post, one of the world’s (the WORLD’s!) most read newspapers, has informed they will print my letter in response to an article about Christmas published in the Syle Section on December 22, 2003 (click link to read). Instead of over analyzing my feelings of the situation (like I usually do), I’ll just show you what he wrote, and what I wrote in response. Feel free to pick up a copy on Saturday to see my article, most like in abridged form. But here’s the only place you’ll get to see the original. Gosh, I should write in more often. I bet they’d publish a lot of my articles. Gosh, I should get a job with the Post or something. When in Doubt . . . . . . Just Say 'Merry Christmas' By Blake Gopnik Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, December 22, 2003; Page C01 Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. I know I'm not supposed to say it, but I do. Merry Christmas. "Happy Holidays," "Best of the Season" -- those are now the sanctioned greetings at this time of year, but I can't bring myself to use them. At last week's office party, I was the last holdout for the old form. Even the churchy few in the department seemed shocked to get a hearty "Merry Christmas" from me. "Merry Christmas": I know those Christian-sounding words ought to feel odd coming from my lips -- I'm a third-generation atheist of Jewish ancestry, and I'm almost evangelical in my lack of faith. But they feel fine. Merry Christmas. I guess one reason that I cling to "Merry Christmas" is that the new greetings feel like bland euphemisms, like bureaucratized newspeak, at best like cheapo substitutes for the old one -- like plastic Christmas trees taking the place of scented pine by governmental fiat. There's an aesthetic issue here, I think, and, as an art critic, aesthetics are as close as I come to a religion. I believe that holidays get part of their beauty from hallowed tradition. For them to keep their special luster, their ties to the past have to be kept intact. (My Christmas-crazy family refuses to play carols written after 1900; our favorites predate the Enlightenment.) The wonderfully secular, partly pagan solstice celebration that's coming on Dec. 25 has also had a tie to Christ for about 1,800 years; the link is too well forged to try to break it now without diminishing the whole event. As a nonbeliever, I guess I could wish that the ancient solar holiday had not been hijacked by some early followers of Christ -- but at this late date, that would be pointless wishful thinking. In truth, however, I find beauty even in the most clearly Christian parts of Christmas, and I'm not willing to lose out on it, or let the Christians keep it for themselves. For all my devout atheism, I'm still touched by the story of the wise men following the star, of the shepherds walking to the stable to view the glowing, magic baby and of the raging tyrant who tries, and fails, to kill him. This is all good folk poetry, on a par with anything in antique myth or Egyptian ritual or any defunct religion that I can appreciate without professing to. I've spent a good portion of my life looking at Renaissance altarpieces, and their evidently Christian functions never managed to detract from the beauty that I found in them. I could even enjoy how gorgeously and well they did their sacred job, without believing that they worked to catch the favor of a deity. I'd argue -- and here the country's higher courts will be glad to get my assenting vote -- that a few formerly religious phrases have now become part of secular life and ceremony. I'll buy "In God We Trust" as crucial decoration on the dollar bill, and I'll use "Merry Christmas" as the right words to usher in the solstice season, without thinking that I've made a profession of faith by saying them. In fact, by continuing to use "Merry Christmas" as simply a cheery season's greeting, I feel that I'm reclaiming it from this culture's creeping zealotry. At last we're down to brass tacks, I think. Christmas, in its Roman and pagan origins, even in its medieval practice, was a time to turn things topsy-turvy, to thumb noses at the powerful majority and all its pieties. There's something deliciously subversive, and therefore fully Christmasy, about the memories I have of me and my five siblings, atheists all, dancing around a decorated Christmas tree while singing ancient songs about the First Nowell, the harking of the Herald Angels and the Three Kings with their rubber cigar. So in the full spirit of the holiday I'd like to wish us one and all, Christians and Jews, Muslims and Zoroastrians (even my fellow atheists), a very, very Merry Christmas. My response: Washington Post Staff Writer Blake Gopnik's essay entitled "When in Doubt...Just Say 'Merry Christmas'" is a breath of fresh air for this follower of a Palestinian Jew from the First Century. Gopnik provides believer and unbeliever alike an honest perspective of the western world's most famous holiday and shows us there is no social harm in celebrating, even if unaffiliated with, Christmas, and I give him props for that. But Gopnik's impartial participation reveals a rudderless "pick and choose" approach so common in society. Much like when Marco Polo revealed pictures of the Christmas event to "pagan" Orientals. They embraced the virgin mother and baby in swaddling cloth. But when Polo began talking of a beaten and bloody king, they had no part in it and reverted back to the harmless babe. We don't like bloody sacrifice and divine humility. We, by nature, resist anything that insinuates us as sinners in need of a Savoir. This drives me to believe that Gopnik isn't so generous in his "Good Friday's" or "Happy Easter's" as he is in his "Merry Christmas's". Christmas, with it's pastoral shepards, fluffy sheep, and a baby that can't control its bladder, isn't internally offensive to anyone, believer or not. Good Friday (the crux of Christianity), though a bittersweet event to believers, is extremely offensive to non-believers. Try saying "Good Friday" to your co-workers and family members; I doubt the reception will be as nice. That is the true litmus test of a true religious apathetic. -Keith Wojciech |