LARGETONY Blog

Something has me curious. It deals with the whole separation of church and state thing called for by the U.S. Constitution. You know, its that thing that says that there can not be prayer in schools, you can’t display the Ten Commandments in government buildings, etc. For the good of the country, religion and government can’t commingle (what a cool word).

Now here is where the question comes in. Christmas is undoubtedly a Christian holiday (given that Christ is the root of both words, its safe to assume.) and Christianity is certainly a religion. Now, stay with me. The Federal Government is represented in “the State.” Right? So, if church and state are to remain separate, how is it that the religious holiday, Christmas, is also a federal holiday. I’m not saying that it should not be a federal holiday, I’m just wondering how it slipped under the radar and got on the list of official government holidays. In fact, it is the ONLY religious holiday that is also a federal holiday.

Was there ever an argument about this in Congress? Or did it just happen? I thought maybe it’s just that the U.S. government has been, and still is overwhelmingly made up of Christians. After all, even in post-Kennedy USA, people are still freaked by the thought of anything other than a Christian President. They were even spookedby the possibility of a Jewish Vice-President (and everyone knows the V.P. has no power or effect on anything. I’ll be he can’t even request extra mushrooms on pizza night at the White House). Besides, if its truly separation of church and state, then the worship choices of polititians doesn’t matter. (You hear that red states?)

But I realized it can’t be just becuase there’s way more professed Christians in the government than anything else. After all, the people who observe the birth of Christ would also observe his death,( and subsequent ascention) and neither Easter nor Good Friday made the cut of official holidays for our national, state, and civic leaders.

Is it because Christmas, as a holiday, seems to have less and less to do with religion year-after-year and more to do with mass consumption of household electronics. That has to be it. Christmas is all about getting off work, getting out of school, hanging up hundreds of lights, and spending thousands of dollars on presents for everyone that you are afraid of offending if you didn’t. I’m not being preachy. I’m as guilty as anyone else…anyone American, anyway. You know we go WAY more nuts than other countries with our holidays.

And we’ve made it so hard on ourselves. We’ve put so much pressure on ourselves to clebrate Christmas. The hours of stringing lights. The cooking and cooking and cooking. The fighting long lines and crowds, not to mention the emptying of our wallets, to find a present that is exactly what receiver wants. Isn’t that kind of backwards when you think about it? The whole tradition of giving gifts is supposed to be representative of the gifts brought to the baby Jesus by the Wise Men. Now those guys didn’t give Jesus what they thought he would want. What’s a newborn gonna do with gold, frankensense, and myhrr?? They brought those things becuase they were items precious to them. So shouldn’t we be giving up something that is precious to us when giving gifts? I’m sure all Jesus wanted just after birth was a nice belly full of mother’s milk. (and maybe some Huggies). Gold and perfume were the last things on his mind.

So I guess there is no need to even be concerned with the muddying of church and state when it comes to Christmas. Why worry about the separation of church and state when our society has separated the church from Christmas?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 14th, 2004 at 5:19 am and is filed under topical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.