While I roast some chestnuts on the fire and move the pieces of the Nativity scene around so that Mary is lying down because she just had a baby for cripes sake, I ponder what Christmas means to me.
I quickly become bored and open up my laptop and check Facebook where I discover what one of my “friends” thinks about Christmas.
There are many things that confuse me about this status update. First, why did I read the whole thing and then take a screen shot of it? And B, was Santa Claus, Rudolph and those Coke-swilling polar bears at Jesus’s birth? And second, does it really bother you when some underpaid, abused retail clerk mumbles “Happy Holidays” rather than making the sign of the cross and saying “HO HO HO Merry Christmas. . . is that what’s really ruining the holiday, not the people who pepper spray other people for a $2.95 Forever Lazy®? And lastly, why are you yelling? The yelling hurts my eyeballs.
Believe me, I would totally be on the same page with you if sh*t was going down like it did when Nero was Roman emperor, and Christians were torn apart by dogs and set on fire. That is some hardcore persecution right there. But this? Some person ringing up your FisherPrice Imaginext 2 Foot Dragon World Fortress™ at the local dollar store, mumbling “Happy Holidays” as s/he tries to avoid getting cancer from exposure to the products made out of asbestos and arsenic? I don’t think your “persecution” is going to land you on the Christian martyr list.
Here’s the thing, “friend.” You can scream or write in caps lock “Merry Christmas” until your lungs burst or you have carpal tunnel and no one will really give a mistletoe sprig (well unless it’s at 4:30 a.m., but that’s why noise ordinances are enacted). That is because in America–for now–you are free to practice or not practice any religion you want. I don’t know if things will change now that the U.S. Senate has voted to allow the military to arrest Americans and detain them indefinitely.
But as it stands if I want to practice the religion of Speaker7ism where I believe Speaker7 is omniscient and omnipresent then praise be to Speaker7.
Now I am by no means a history scholar, but I’ve been able to cobble together some knowledge from Snapple bottle caps, Chinese restaurant menus and the labels on Molson Canadian Light. I have learned that vultures can fly for six hours without flapping their wings and that the founding fathers did not want to repeat the problems in England by creating a state-sponsored religion. It never seems to go well for the people in the religious minority.
Really no one can take your belief away from you unless you let them. And your belief should be that Speaker7 is the light and the way.