Obligatory seasonal post

I jumped the gun with my Tim Minchin post, and now I’m left feeling that if I don’t say something here about the last couple of days my silence will be eloquent with a meaning I have no intention of conveying. So here you go, my seasonal post.

A number of people whom I respect and like have taken up anti-Christmas positions. It’s not just that they hate Christmas. They believe that the only people who should celebrate it are practising Christians, that the rest of us are just being suckered in by capitalism to perform environmentally, socially, politically and/or spiritually repugnant acts, that we’re also playing into a sidelining, or worse, of people who come from non-Christian religious and cultural traditions.

I respectfully take a different view. (So do my Jewish next door neighbours, but that’s another story.) It’s not just that Christmas is (in this hemisphere) a summer solstice festival, or – like the current incarnation of Australia Day – that any public holiday is cause for celebration. Christmas, in my atheistic mind, is specifically about something real and humanly central.

When walking the dog on Friday morning, I tried to think why it mattered to me. I decided, with striking lack of originality, that at the heart of Christmas is an image of a newborn child, the idea that the birth of a child is a cosmic event. That’s something that has meaning for me. I remember in the middle of all the intense emotion around my own first son’s birth having a sense of having engaged with a deep mystery, and the phrase in my head that expressed it, ‘Unto us a child is born.’ That is to say, all the singing and talking and reading about the Manger etc in my childhood had been laying down templates, had been a kind of preparation for parenthood.

If your birthday is the day when you are celebrated just for having been born, Christmas is the day when we, or at least I, do that for all of us. It’s a time for celebrating the fact that we were all babies once, for acknowledging our shared humanity (‘goodwill to all’), our connection with each other – friends and family, mainly, but also strangers walking their dogs and, for people more civic minded than I am, the homeless and potential recipients of  Oxfam goats.

That’s it. Happy Christmas!

My ruminations did move on, to wondering if this emphasis on the child is particular to the Christian tradition. It occurred to me that Eid l-’Aḍḥā, described by one of the participants in Bankstown Pressure Cooks as being about ‘the sacrifice of the sheep’, is connected. There’s no cute baby, but the event being celebrated is the angel’s intervention in Ibrahim/Abraham’s sacrifice of  his son (Isaac in the Hebrew Bible, Ishmael in the Holy Koran), and directing him to sacrifice a sheep instead. I think of this story as a record of the moment in the history of the Semitic peoples when human sacrifice came to an end. Obviously I don’t have any of the insider’s grasp of the emotional meaning of the Eid, but it seems a fair enough speculation that it too is about a joyful honouring of the human.

Belatedly, Happy Eid!

Any thoughts on other traditions, anyone?