Merry whatever.

Every day for the last five, I've come home fully intending to blog something. And every day for the last five, I've sat down at the computer, composed my thoughts over a game of air hockey, and abruptly decided I'm too friggin' tired to blog anything. My brain's turned to sludge.
And it's only about to get worse.
Every year, the Christmas ad is a bitch for those of a dairy persuasion. It seems like they put every third item on sale, with no conception of display space, to say nothing of backshop storage.
So work life is about to go squirrelly, yet again.
Around this time of year, it has become fashionable to lament the deChristification of the season. You can't open a paper without reading an article decrying the use of 'Happy Holidays' and 'Season's Greetings'. "It's called CHRISTMAS", we're told.
I used to be among the throngs of people taking offense at the people who take offense at 'Merry Christmas'. I've had a mild change of brain over the past few years as I've watched a theocracy struggling to birth itself to our south.
Oh, I still have no problem with 'Merry Christmas'. But I'm beginning to have a real problem with that sort of bleating Christian (hey, they even refer to themselves as sheep; who am I to argue?) who seems to forget their Messiah is something of a Jesus-come-lately.

If you read your Bible closely, you'll find no mention of the calendar date of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. Various calculations have been done suggesting a birth date in spring or early summer; I've also seen September suggested. It's not really surprising we don't have a date for the birth of Jesus Christ considering nobody even knows what year he was born.
So why December 25th? Like everything else, it was a political decision. Basically, the Roman Catholic Church said "worship our God, and you can still have your old festival!"

At any rate, it often seems to be forgotten that Jesus himself was Jewish and would have thus celebrated Hanukkah, if anything. (Jesus always struck me as a man not beholden to anyone's calendar; I think he was one who celebrated life every day.) And there are far older faiths than either Christianity or Judaism: Hinduism, for example, whose winter festival Diwali falls a month or two earlier; or take the pagan faith of the Druids, still held by some today, and its winter solstice festival. The Chinese celebrate a solstice festival, too (Dong Zhi), ditto the Persians (Yalda). All of these predate Christianity, mostly by millennia.

None of this is to belittle people's celebration of Christmas. But it would behoove us to remember that not all of us (and, given our birth rates, indeed, fewer and fewer of us) are Christian. Perhaps the shrillness I've heard of late simply mirrors that fact: maybe Christians are afraid their voices will be lost.