Thread: Christmas comes but once a year: but must it?

TELL IT AS IT IS
Christmas comes but once a year: but must it?


By Pornpimol Kanchanalak
Published on December 25, 2008


It wasn't until 1992, after more than a decade of living in the United States, that I finally learned the true meaning of the spirit of Christmas. Over the years before, Christmas to me went from being a novel and electrifying celebration, to loneliness to tranquillity. In the days leading up to December 24, no one can escape the buying frenzy. Christmas music blares in every mall and at every street corner, on buses and subways, and in elevators, cajoling your senses into the "spirit" of the holiday and luring you to "max out" on credit cards.





Christmas can turn into a pressure cooker for some people - trying to get the perfect Christmas tree, pick the right presents and wrapping, waiting patiently at the post office, getting the house ready for visiting relatives and friends, and preparing the big family meal. There are always lines at airports and bus depots. At the malls, I see anxious people running around, some like a chicken without a head, especially as it gets closer to the day. No one looks happy.
Then whoosh! By December 25, the frenzy is over and all is quiet. In homes across the land, it is time to open gifts. It betokens the mad dash of gift returning at malls the day after Christmas.
Then there are the Christmas parties, when a good time can be had by all. When I was in school in California, I found out during holiday parties that many of my fellow students brewed their own beer and grew their own weed. And there were backyard hot tubs where anyone was welcome to hop in. As I always chickened out of taking an active part in these fun dares - due to my sense of protecting my "Thai-ness" - friends would draw a square around my head in party photos.
As the excitement from the newness of my Christmas experience waned, my thoughts during the holiday seasons turned to Albert Camus' novel "The Myth of Sisyphus", in which he writes about a man who wakes up every day and goes about his routine of pushing a rock up to the top of a mountain. Once there, the rock rolls down and Sisyphus has to start over, again and again. I began to think that the holiday gift-buying routine signified an absurd aspect of human activity.
Then it was loneliness for people like me who had no family to return to during the holiday seasons. The town suddenly became very quiet. I ended up doing house-sitting for friends who had gone to family reunions in other states. I usually spent Christmas Day taking food to homeless people, even brought them Christmas trees. I thought that they and I shared a common aspect of life.
Then came the stage when my melancholy lonesomeness turned into a strange, matter-of-fact sense of tranquillity. Perhaps my psychological defence mechanism kicked in or my psyche became hard-boiled with age. It was not too bad to be alone.
But in 1992 I was made to realise that I got it all wrong with Christmas.
That year, a friend of mine showed me a photograph he took in December 1991 when he and his wife, both journalists, were on their way to cover the massacre of civilians by Serb paramilitaries in a small village in Croatia, where genocide was being carried out in full force by the Serbs against Croats.
The photograph was of a little boy and his grandfather, both in worn-out winter clothes, walking down a hilly road blanketed with snow. The grandfather's face was wrinkled and his body crooked, with one leg appearing shorter than the other - due perhaps to injury. The grandfather was lugging the sorriest-looking Christmas tree on his shoulder, while the boy by his side had the happiest beaming smile on his little round face. It was a picture of misery and hardship alongside pure joy.
It was then that I was able to grasp the spirit of Christmas and what it really means.
It is a time that symbolises the indomitable human spirit; hope despite despair; a ray of light that shines into the darkest corners ravaged by the atrocities of war and conflict; the good will, friendship and brotherhood in mankind despite the most terrible things we are capable of doing to each other. While Bethlehem at times resembles a war zone rather than the place where the infant Jesus was born, people are still willing to give peace a try.
The composer and poet Samuel Hazo once said we all lived on the ground floor of the Tower of Babel. As there is no way for me to find the stairs up, I will part to a most beautiful poem written about Christmas. Composed in 1864 by the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. During the Civil War and amid horrific personal tragedies, he penned the words that appear below. Merry Christmas and Glad Tidings!
I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
Till, ringing, singing on its way
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime,
A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The Carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
And in despair I bowed my head;
'There is no peace on earth,' I said;
'For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!'
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
'God is not dead; nor doth he sleep!
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men!'

The Byzantine icon above is the work of the 16th-century iconographer Theophanes the Cretan. There are many things that are un-Islamic about it:


1. It is an image of human beings, which violates the traditional Islamic prohibition of images;
2. It depicts Jesus not as a Muslim prophet but as the incarnate Son of God (his halo reads ο ων, the One Who Is, a title of divinity derived from the name of God that God gives to Moses in Exodus 3:14), in violation of the oft-repeated Qur'anic injunction that Allah has no Son (4:171; 9:30; 25:2; 39:4; 72:3; etc. etc.);

3. In line with #2, it depicts what Muslims would consider to be idolatry, as the holy child's mother kneels and adores him;
4. In the beam or spear coming from heaven down to the child in the cradle, it depicts the activity of the Divine in the world, assuming the doctrine of the Trinity, which is rejected somewhat imprecisely in Qur'an 4:171 and 5:116;

5. The cradle resembles a casket, foreshadowing the redemptive death of Christ, which is denied in Qur'an 4:157.
Now, whether you are a Christian or not, whether or not you believe all or any of these things, the question that is before us this Christmas is whether or not people should be allowed to believe these things if they think they are true. Nowhere in the Islamic world today do people who believe these things enjoy full equality of rights with Muslims. In Pakistan, Egypt and elsewhere Christians are frequently victimized because, as I have tried to show above, some of their core beliefs are considered blasphemous in authoritative Islam.

And that assumption of blasphemy, since Islam is a political program as well as a set of religious beliefs, does not allow for live-and-let live tolerance of those with whom one disagrees. The blasphemers and those who insult Islam must be subjugated under the rule of the Muslims. We see this agenda being articulated every day; we see Christians and others victimized by it every day; and we see the world largely yawning and indifferent as all this goes on.


This Christmas, remember that the Islamic supremacist program has you on its list. You may not be a Christian. You may not be a Jew. You may not be a Hindu. But the jihad is universal. You are on the list. So this Christmas, may all of us whose conversion, subjugation, or death is envisioned by the adherents of Sharia stand together. Let us stand together as Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, secularists, what have you, and stand up against those who would kill us or subject us to institutionalized discrimination because they find our beliefs offensive.



For be assured: if we do not stand together, they will prevail. And if they do, and all the rich expressions of the human spirit, from Theophanes the Cretan to the fashioners of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, from Aristotle to Oriana, will be trampled into the mud, destroyed, exploded, ruined, effaced. We will all be the poorer. Our children will be the poorer.



Merry Christmas to all Christian Jihad Watchers who celebrate the Feast on this day.


Merry Christmas y'all...


Source

I can vouch that the Christmas spirit isalive and well n Bangkok this year.

On Christmas Day I walked into a well-known Irish pub with every inention of enjoing the advertised Christmas lunch with full trimmings. I entered at 3pm to find the pub half empty and with most tables unoccupied. The Thai waitress kindly informed me that I would not be served as I was unaccompanied. Apparently they can get two people to a table and just having one person to a table loses money.

So I dined elsewhere thereby adding to their profits.

After a while I came to appreciate that this is an aspect of the Christmas story we are unfamiliar with. Had Joseph arrived at the manger alone he may have been told to shove off to make room for a couple who would have paid more.

Is this a side to the Nativity story we are not aware of? Rest assured that next Christmas, if I wish to dine at the Dubliner, I'll grab a tart from Soi Cowboy so as to ensure I may be served. Well, either that or dine elsewhere.