Should we abolish Christmas this year?

December 22nd, 2006 by Avanka Fernando

Good grief??? What an absurd question to ask you might say! What kind of a Scrooge would suggest such a preposterous thought? Why on earth would anyone want to abolish Christmas? Why would anyone want to take away the fun and joy of the most wonderful time of the year as the song goes. Why on earth would any one want to throw a dampener on the time that is a time for giving and receiving, a time of forgiving and forgetting a time of joy and peace?!?
All these are very important questions…and similar thought ran through my mind but as I read this article on this particular topic and as I thought further about it I realized that the entire Celebration of Christmas celebration has become a huge farce!
The History of the celebration of Christmas-
But, Christmas celebrates the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ. Well, the Feast of the Nativity of Christ has only been observed since the 4^th Century A.D. No one knows the day or month of Christ’s birth in Bethlehem. 25^th December was the date of a Roman festival celebrating the birthday of the unconquered sun which at the winter solstice begins again to show an increase in light. Sometime before 336 A.D. the church in Rome spiritualised this as the Feast of Nativity of the Son of Righteousness. Moreover the modern Christmas with all its commercial trappings, parties and sentimentality dates from 19^th Century England: the romanticizing of the Christmas story has gone hand in hand with commercial exploitation ever since. So you see Christmas today has nothing at all to do with the church. And in real we are celebrating a pagan festival which due to Western romanticization has become a part and parcel of our own culture. Our Sri Lankan culture is such that many times we adopt Western practices without really thinking too much about them. Actually we’re cultural dopes…we just consume different cultural practices and we think these practices are so modern and westernized but we really do not stop once to think about how stupid they really are… The media has a major role to play in creating an aura of joy around the entire celebration of Christmas. Therefore, they come up with clever gimmicks like Santastic Fair, Snow City, Christmas Bonanzas, Mega sales… The list of absurdities goes on…

• Advent Calender-of chocolates at Cinnamon Grand for kids
• Everybody’s Santa with HSBC
• Abans Christmas Carnival and sales-Upto 60% discounts
• Every day is Christmas…
• E.H Cooray’s Annual Furniture Sale
• The perfect gift for the season-Parker pens
• Promo of the Week-Christmas Accessories from Dwellings
• Have the time of your life with Wimaladharma’s this year!
• Boru nathi sale!
• Mega Bang

Oh and don’t forget Odel’s wonderful marketing techniques and their snazzy red bags with joy, lust, passion, desire, rapture, revenge, conquest emblazoned on them. My goodness! One wouldcertainly have a pretty amazing Christmas if we go along with ODEL wouldn’t we? What’s with all these words??? What are they trying to prove? That they have a very good vocabulary…that they do know English? Well…I’m sure that none of us had any doubts about that! After all they do cater to an extremely elitist clientele don’t they? Or are they trying to associate these words with Christmas and saying that if you shop at ODEL this Christmas these words could become you or rather that you would become these words? You can be a person who is joyful, encourages lust or better yet is lustful, is passionate…at times this passion could rise to a level of rapture…or does it mean you get raptured? (Hmmm…could ODEL be the sole sponsors of the Second Coming?) There are times when one’s emotions moves to another level of revenge…of conquest? Amazing! This is the ODEL Effect! This is the ODEL version of Christmas for you! Play the Association game and just think…what’s the association between joy and Christmas? How about lust and Christmas? And what about revenge and Christmas? A lot of associations obviously…
We who are apparently intelligent human beings why are we fooled…why do we fall prey to colonialist racketeering of these already rich shop owners and the media! Are we only a bunch of hapless, helpless clones in their hands!
Well I thought of posing the question… Should we be celebrating Christmas with the usual futile traditions and gimmicks???
The false situation is told to us by the media, but the real situation in our country is…

• A state of Emergency in our country extended by a month. Bombs exploding at every junction. Our young people (Both Sinhala & Tamil) getting blown up every day.
• Aerial bombing in Jaffna. (thousands of people living in fear everyday)
• Thousands of refugees due to the war in the North.
• Many families still living without a proper shelter due to the tsunami 2004. The families of the 30,000 victims of the tsunami will be miserable this Christmas while you and I are probably spending our Christmas with our families!
• Many young people who are lonely, suicidal. Sri Lanka still has a high rate of suicides.
• 815 identified Aids patients in Sri Lanka. Who knows how many unidentified patients?
• 150 people displaced in Hambantota by floods.

So think as you go out to do your shopping or as you take part in the usual Christmas traditions…what am I really celebrating?
Well if you want to celebrate the real Christmas…newsflash people! The real Christmas involved a young pregnant woman and a confused man (aren’t they all?) wandering around in a busy street looking for a place to rest. Jesus their baby…the Son of God born in a manger (anyone knows what a cattle shed smells like? I don’t and frankly I’m not too keen on finding out) But Jesus knew and by being born there…He identified with the poorest of the poor! Soon they were on the move again…refugees on the run from the bloodthirsty Herod’s strategies to annihilate all male babies under two years old! So Jesus identified with the refugees and He knows what they feel as they do not have a place to call their own…and finally Jesus is born at Christmas with one mission in mind…He is born to die! Whew! What a mission! This is not just a meaningless suicide! But He dies for us to live! For a world which was traveling on a one ticket to the depths of hell…He gives His life to give us eternal life! So this is the real Christmas! Question is what Christmas are you going to be a part of???

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