I loved this suggestion from the thread on Chrismahanukwanzakah:
All Mixed Up - i sort of have a soft spot for christmas trees… i think they’re fun. when i have kids i’m going to decorate my tree with Om ornaments and little sita, ganesha, and ram ornaments…and my tree is going to be topped with a flute playing krishna. [okay i probably won’t do that…but it was a fun picture to paint in my head].Not mixed up after all - I actually did that last year. Put up a tree with ornaments and bulbs and topped it with a silver idol of Krishna playing the flute…My “Krishmas” tree :-)
The Christmas tree already was up when I went home at Thanksgiving, and was quite pretty except for the hideously oversized red bow at the top. What to do with the top of the tree is an annual problem. Many years we’ve just stuck a random ornament, or left it bare. This year, I suggested that Mom replace the aesthetically distressing ribbon with a big gold OM that was gathering dust on a high shelf in the kitchen. This way we could avoid distressing the Christmas fanatics by not secularizing our tree, without having to put an angel or star in which we don’t believe there. Manish, this doesn’t fall into the schlock category of a tree in the shape of an OM, does it?
Yes, despite what you might have thought after reading my grumping about the made-up “discrimination” against Christians, I celebrate Christmas and have done so for years. My mom claims that when we were very little, she would give us gifts on Diwali instead (supposedly some people do this for Pancha Ganapati), but we would cry at Christmas because we didn’t get presents then. As they couldn’t easily afford two gift-giving seasons back then, my parents opted to assimilate a bit more and get in on this Christmas thing, and now that they’re better off, we go for the full materialist extravaganza of gifts, food and travel.
But thanks to William A. Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights and the man who got Wal-Mart to fire the poor schmuck who knew about Christmas’s pagan origins (and now is launching a boycott of Land’s End), I might have to give up Christmas.
Donohue’s latest way of getting his name in the news is to complain about the White House holiday card sent to 1.4 million friends and supporters and funded by the Republican National Committee. (My barely-Hindu and not-at-all-Christian father likely got one of these, because Jesus doesn’t donate to the GOP and Dad does.) When told that “holiday” is the government’s and retail sector’s way of including everyone, Donahue is not mollified. “Ninety-six percent of Americans celebrate Christmas. Spare me the diversity lecture.”
That’s likely true, even though the 2001 census found that 20% of Americans do not identify as Christian and almost 50% are not adherents to a Christian church, because the U.S. has done such a thorough job of secularizing and universalizing the holiday that non-Christians feel like they can participate. If Donohue et. al succeed in their crusade to force everyone into their narrow conception of what the holidays mean, fewer people will want to be part of it. Nearly every American may exchange gifts and take the day off from work, it being a federal holiday and all, but a much smaller number go to church or otherwise advert to the religious nature of December 25 — which is not even approximately the day on which historians believe Christ to have been born.
The idea of having George W. Bush track which Americans are Christians and which are of other religions, though not of Ashcroftian levels of creepiness, is nonetheless disturbing. The Kennedys and Johnson briefly attempted to send Christmas cards to Christians and Happy New Year cards to everyone else (perhaps being aware that Hannukah is such a relatively minor holiday on the Jewish calendar, that to send Hannukah cards without noting Yom Kippur would be obviously pathetic). Because doing so required keeping track of Christian and non-Christian recipients, however, they gave up.
Tim Wildmon, president of the American Family Association in Tupelo, Miss. and boycotter of Macy’s and Target, excuses President Bush for the cards by assuming that they are “just political correctness run amok.” He makes what almost sounds like a plausible argument when he says, “It bothers me that the White House card leaves off any reference to Jesus, while we’ve got Ramadan celebrations in the White House.” Hey, maybe we really are giving more time to minority faiths than to the majority one.
