The
other
night,
by
a beautiful
coincidence during the first
big snowstorm of the season, I turned down the lights and stretched
out, wrapped
up in blankets, to watch my favorite Christmas special, the
Rankin/Bass
claymation Rudolph
the Red-Nosed Reindeer,
which I have never missed once in all my life.If
you missed it yourself, you’ll be
pleased
to hear that Rudolph saved Christmas again this year, defying,
forgiving, and
ultimately annihilating the cruelty of those who’d believed
it necessary to drive
him away in order to preserve it.Along
the way, we were again reminded that Bumbles bounce, that gold
nuggets
are of
little use to squirrels, and that female reindeer have long
sexy eyelashes.
During
the special, it occurred to me how surprised a
lot of people would probably be if they knew how much I loved it.In
fact, I realized, most
people in this
country would probably assume I hated it, and that I would be
inclined to rip
on people who watch it every year, especially well into adulthood.Since
exactly the opposite
is true, this was
interesting.And
like many interesting
things, it was funny for a couple of minutes, but then horribly sad.So I decided to write an
essay about it.
The
reason, of course, that so many people would be surprised
to learn that the guy behind The 1585 makes a yearly
ritual of Rudolph
is that Rudolph
is a Christmas special, and I am an atheist.Most
of the country probably identifies me,
and secular humanists generally, with the Abominable Snowmonster of the
North,
the Rudolph
antagonist who
“hates
everything to do with Christmas.”Indeed,
the right-wing media have gotten lots of
mileage out of accusing
us of waging a “War on Christmas.”But I might remind everyone that, as pertains
to things like the
“political
incorrectness” of saying “Merry
Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays,”
this is
actually a matter of the various religions fighting amongst
themselves. Since, as atheists, we regard all religions as
equally crazy,
it’s inaccurate
to lay the entire controversy at the doorstep of atheism.The
reason I say "Happy Holidays" to people I don't know is because I live
in a big city where there's a fairly good chance the person I'm talking
to is Jewish, or a member of some other religion that isn't
Christianity. I have no problem saying "Merry Christmas" to
people I know celebrate it, and neither does
any atheist
I know. But most importantly, the reason we humanists don't
have a problem
with Christmas is because we realize Christmas doesn’t really
have
a whole lot to do with
Christianity anyway.
Take Rudolph,
for
example.It's the
story of an
an adorable talking reindeer who triumphs over senseless
discrimination and
saves the day in the end.If
liking this
story requires belief in the divinity of Jesus, or is incompatible with
scientific humanism, we certainly
don’t see how, and
we’re pretty smart.Sure,
it contradicts
the scientific position that reindeer can’t talk or fly, but
it also contradicts
the Biblical stance that animals are soulless and valuable only insofar
as they
are useful to humans.Aside
from the
historical accident of its having been thought up in conjunction with a
Christian holiday, there’s no reason why the story of Rudolph
“belongs” more to
Christians than it does to anyone else — and no reason why the
“anyone else”
shouldn’t include atheists as much as Jews, Buddhists,
Mandaeans, or anybody at all who really likes the part where he goes
“She said
I’m cuuuuuuuuute!” and
then is the very best at flying.
On
the face of it, there’s no reason for anyone not
to like this, because clearly it is
awesome.And I’m
sure that there are
Christians who use the fact that it is awesome as an argument for
Christianity.But
as I said before, Rudolph
is only a Christian story on a
technicality, and the same goes for Frosty, etc.None
of these is a story from the Bible, and
whenever someone tries to make a Christmas special that is
a story from the Bible, it sucks.Claiming
Rudolph as an argument in favor of Christianity is like
saying you have to convert to Judaism if you thought it was funny when
Adam
Sandler did “The Chanukah Song.”
The only
even-halfway Christian
thing about Rudolph
is the fact
that it involves
Santa Claus — and frankly, calling Santa Claus “even-halfway Christian”
is
pretty generous on my part.During
the
pre-Christian year’s-end festival of Yule, the god Odin, in
the form of an old
man with a white beard, was believed by little pagan girls and boys to
travel
from house to house on a flying horse, slide down the chimney, and
leave
presents of candy (and the candy was shaped like letters,
because the holiday commemorated the invention
of poetry, so
as a poet, I'm loath
to surrender it).Clearly,
this
was basically Christmas.Then
the
Christians got to that part of Europe,
and what happened
was more-or-less the following:
Christians: How
about
we start saying it’s St. Nicholas, instead of Odin?
Norse: Can
we still
give one another presents, and light pretty candles, and sing songs
and eat candy?
Christians: Sure.
Norse:
Then
we
could
give a fuck.
St. Nicholas it is.
I may
have left a few things
out, but anyway, that’s pretty
much how I feel.People
who live in
places where it gets really cold and dark and shitty at this time of
year have
always wanted to have a big fun party right in the middle of it,
because
otherwise everyone would kill themselves (you will note that the
importance of
Christmas in Christianity increased alongside Christian incursion into
places
where the weather sucked during that season), and you have to call it
something.The
Danes and Anglo-Saxons
called it Yule.We
could try to bring
that name back, but what’s the point?We
don’t believe in Odin either.
Besides,
they also called
January “Wolfmonth,” so if we’re
going to bring anything back, it should totally be that.People
would be like
“Hey, what month were
you born in, because if it’s some pussy month we’re
going to fuck with you,”
and if you were born in January you could be like “fucking
WOLFMONTH,” and then
they’d be all like “Ahhh!Let’s
get out
of here!”
Janus,
Pussy God for Stupid
JerksFucking WOLF
The
choice is
clear.
But this is
irrelevant, because
the Santa Claus of Rudolph — and
of most Christmas specials
and movies — is neither Odin nor St. Nicholas. He
is a secular figure.
He is
ostensibly immortal and has magic powers, but there’s nothing
in Rudolph
(or in most Christmas
specials)
about his being appointed by the Christian God (or any god), or about
him only
bringing presents to Christian children. As
far as we know, this Santa Claus answers to
no-one, and brings
presents to everyone.
And
anyone who believes that
this Santa Claus is
an extension of
the will of God is in
big theological trouble, because the entire plot hinges on him being wrong
about something.If
Rudolph’s
father had been the only one
who
had a problem with his glowing red nose, then Rudolph could just have
toughed
it out until he got his own place and everything would have been fine.But
for some reason, Santa himself
explicitly states that
Rudolph’s
nose will prevent him from ever being a part of the sleigh
team — so the problem
is not simply teasing, but rather de
jure employment discrimination.This
is inarguably unjustifiable, and until his conversion in the last act,
Santa
comes off as not merely flawed,
but
a straight-up asshole.Even
at the end of the special, he’s
far from perfect, because it
apparently remains the case that only male
reindeer can pull the sleigh
(which,
although he doesn’t appear in the special, means that Vixen
is a boy — I can only
assume that this led to Vixen eventually
making a vow to kill the deer who give’m that awful name,
finding him dealing
stud in Gatlinburg in mid-July, and winding up kicking and a-gouging in
the mud
and the blood and the beer).
So, if
you’re
claiming Rudolph for Christianity on the basis
that Santa Claus is an extension of the Christian God, then you also
need to
find a way to account for his shitty behavior.Or
at least, try to learn from how, at the end, he
admits he was wrong.
Which
brings us to the matter of how that
one elf is clearly beyond
gay,
which
you guys have a problem with and we don’t. Sure,
you can say that it wasn’t
intentional and it just looks that way
now, and some of you might even try to say that we’ve ruined
that special by trying to make
people think that elf is gay.
But this is like saying
that we’ve ruined
nighttime by trying to make
people think it’s dark out at nighttime, because holy
shit that elf is so
gay.
You can
say that all elves are
fundamentally kind of gay to
begin with, but this one is especially gay, even for an elf.You
can point out that
they’re just trying to
make him seem different,
and that
people tend to process all difference as sexual
difference — and this would
be a good point, except for the
fact that there were any number of ways they could have made him seem
different
besides giving him a lisp and designing him to look exactly
like the
girl elves.The
other male elves don’t
even have hair, and he has frosted tips sticking out from under his elf
hat. He
says he
wants to be a dentist, but he might
as well be saying that he wants to open the North Pole’s only CherMuseum.Actually,
he might even be
transgendered rather
than gay, since his name is Hermey (not
“Herbie” — listen closely).You
could say
that this isn’t intentional either, and they just liked the
name, except that
it’s not even a real name.
Okay, I’ve made my
point.But the
reason I laid it on so thick there is
because I am arguing
that this was
clearly intentional.It’s
not like
the special is from 500 years
ago — it’s from 1964, and it’s not like all that stuff didn’t
come off as gay then.In
fact, Hermey’s appearance and mannerisms more
closely approximate gay stereotypes from that
time than they do
gay
stereotypes from now.The
only
difference is that, back then, the makers of the special had the
advantage of
knowing people would just assume this was an accident and not say
anything
(like the running “my master, Mister Bates” joke in Gulliver’s
Travels,
which was, of course, also intentional).I
tried looking into whether any of the
people at Rankin/Bass involved with Rudolph’s
production were gay, but this was inconclusive (the only significant
thing I
found was that the special’s writer, Romeo Muller, never
married or
had any kids... which could
mean he was
gay, or
could mean he was just an exceptionally lucky straight person).In
any case, Rudolph
is explicitly an
exhortation for
tolerance of all stripes, regardless of whether anyone had gay rights specifically
in mind (the line where the
Misfit Doll sings “Wake up, don’t you know
it’s time to come out?” is a
coincidence… probably).
I
heard someplace that “dentist” was gay code from
the early sixties — as in “Hey, what bar do all the
dentists hang out in?” — but
I couldn’t find it substantiated anywhere, and I have to admit it
seems
unlikely.Eventually,
you would have
just ended up getting your ass kicked by a bunch of real
dentists — like when my
friend’s little brother’s friend was working at KFC
and selling weed out of
the drive-thru window and the code word was “extra
biscuits,” only eventually
someone pulled up and said “extra biscuits” because
they actually wanted extra
biscuits, and it turned out to be a cop.
True
story.Anyway,
that elf’s gay.
So,
it is certainly not the case
that atheists “have a problem with” any and all
things to do with Christmas, or
with any other religious observance.This
is because “things to
do with Christmas” can
happen, or not happen, to overlap with values that we share with
believers — the
dynamic here is pretty self-explanatory: in cases where your
values
overlap with ours, we share them, and in cases where they
don’t, we don’t.The
only
Christmas-related belief inherent
in
atheism is that we don’t believe Jesus of Nazareth (or anyone
else) was divine;
we believe he was a mortal man.So,
if
that constitutes “having a problem with” Christmas,
then we do, and if it
doesn’t, then we don’t.
The fact
that Jesus’s
theological title of “Christ” is in
the name for the day actually means little to most of us.The
word for Thursday
comes from “Thor’s
day,” and we don’t believe in Thor either — so,
logically, if we objected to
calling Christmas Christmas, we would also have to object to calling
Thursday
Thursday, and we don’t.Neither,
for
that matter, do we want to pick a new name for element #80, commonly
known as
“mercury.”Many
of us are
annoyed by the expression
“Jesus is
the reason for the season,” but this is because we know that
most of the
elements that constitute the Christmas celebration (presents
to
children,
decorated coniferous trees, and the date of December 25th)
were
amalgamated into Christian tradition from pagan observances that
predated it — so
our objection to that phrase stems more from a desire for historical
accuracy than from any theological
dispute. To
get
down to the heart of the matter, “Jesus is the reason for the
season” is a
false statement, whereas “flashing lights are
pretty” and “it is fun to give
and receive presents” are true statements.
But
that’s not to say we always distinguish between
Christmas stuff that’s explicitly about Jesus and Christmas
stuff that isn’t,
because we don’t.I
still like a lot of
the Christmas music that's explicitly about Jesus, because a lot of it
is
good music.If I
were going to reject
all music that espoused Christian doctrine, I’d also have to
reject Mozart’s Requiem Mass (among many other
things), and I certainly won’t be doing that anytime soon,
because awesome
music is simply awesome music, regardless of whether you believe that
the
events described in the Bible literally happened.I
don’t believe that the events described
in Lord of the
Rings literally
happened
either, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like Led
Zeppelin, because Led Zeppelin
fucking rocks.Is
Christmas music often
written and sung by people who do
believe that the Bible really happened?Sure.But
for all we know, the
members of Led Zeppelin might believe that Lord
of the Rings really happened.If
they tried to take over the school board and get science curricula
changed to
account for the peculiar chemical properties of the One Ring, then I
and other atheists would
oppose
them in this endeavor to the best of our abilities — but as of
this writing, all
they have done so far is fucking rock.
And this
last paragraph is only
half a joke — it’s as possible
as anything else that, eventually, Lord
of the Rings will become a
religion.Tolkien
was certainly a
better writer than L. Ron
Hubbard, and look how
well Scientology’s done for itself.And
the fans are certainly dedicated — if admission to midnight
mass required Catholics to wait on line for three days in
costume, would they do it?And
yet, if Lord
of the
Rings
were to become a religion tomorrow, that wouldn’t mean that
the people who
didn’t believe in it that way couldn’t still like
those books or those movies.
Likewise,
Christianity will
eventually stop
being a religion.All
religions eventually do.But
when it
does, I bet there will still be a big holiday of some kind around the
end of
December involving lots of bright lights and possibly a big pretty
tree, on which people sing fun songs, eat great food, and
exchange
gifts, and women are hornier than at any other time of the
year.New
traditions
will have been incorporated into it too, and it may even morph into an
observance of the lives of other people in addition to Jesus
(I’m
betting on John Lennon, since observances of his death fall on December
8th,
which is two days closer to the 25th
than is the
feast of St.
Nicholas, who got incorporated pretty seamlessly, and plus radio
stations
already play “Imagine” like it’s a
Christmas song, despite the fact that the
opening line is “Imagine there’s no
Heaven”). It’s
entirely likely
that the day will
still be called Christmas,
because
there’s no particular reason to change the
name — it’s just that the
“christ”
part of the word will have become a trivia question, like the
“thurs” part
of “Thursday.”
In
short, trying to get rid of
all the words, names, and symbols that
entered the language and culture via Christianity would be both
impossible and
unnecessary.It
would mean, among other
things, that we would have to refer to the bad guy from the old Mickey
Mouse
comics as something other than “Black Pete,” since
this name is an
Anglicization of the Dutch Zwarte
Piet,
Santa Claus’s assistant, a manifestation of St. Peter
himself, whose face is
dirty from climbing down chimneys. It would also mean that we
would have to be against people hanging up cardboard vampire faces on
Hallowe'en (vampires are repelled by crucifixes, and hence are a part
of Christian mythology, right?).
“…and
upon
this rock I will build my Church.”
Fundamentalists have been warning for
years that
the emphasis on Santa Claus and presents and fun parties dilutes what
they
consider to be the proper meaning of
Christmas. And
you know what?
They’re
right.
Those things are
definitely in the process
of eroding all sense of Christmas as
an observation of the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth. But
good luck stopping them.
You cannot fight Frosty
the Snowman and
win.
People like
Frosty.
He’s
nice.
In any case, I
also like a lot of Christmas
specials that do
involve Jesus.A
Charlie Brown Christmas gets
explicitly Christian at the end,
and I still
love it.I think
all little kids — and
all adults, if they’re not too busy — should watch it
every year, and Linus’s
climactic recitation of Luke
2:8-14
does not change this for me.I
consider
it (as, most likely, do you) the highlight of the special, and more
often than
not it moves me to tears — and the likelihood of this has increased,
rather than decreased,
both with my aging further beyond childhood, and with the accompanying
intensification of my so-called “Culture War” with the
people who believe in the literal
truth of the words Linus recites.
Why is
this?There
are many reasons.For
starters, I'm smart, so I admire Linus’s impressive ability to
memorize
such a long and
advanced passage of text at his age (many atheists have fond
memories of showing off in similar ways).Furthermore,
in the context of the special,
the recitation serves as the comeuppance of Lucy and her friends, who
had just
been ripping on Charlie Brown for coming back with an adorable real
tree
instead of a trendy aluminum one. Regardless of
one’s theological beliefs, Lucy is a bitch.Finally, I find myself reflecting on how
beautiful
the nativity story is, and (this is where I must part
company with you) how
wonderful it would be if
it were
true.But it
isn’t.
Contrary
to popular belief,
atheists would be overjoyed if
there were a God; we just don’t
believe that there is
one.It is inherent
in human
nature to wish
that there were an
omnipotent being
who loved us at all times with a love beyond comprehension and who
guided
us
through our most exacting trials, and that death were an illusion, and
that we
would be reunited with our loved ones in Heaven, from which lofty
vantage point
we could kick back and watch Nazis and child molesters burn in Hell.It
is also
inherent in human nature to wish that HogwartsAcademy
were a real place and that
a fully-functioning lightsabre could be purchased in Wal-Mart for the
rolled-back price of $29.95.But
none of
these things is true.You
could ask us
for the millionth time how we know
that none of these things is true, and for the millionth time our
answer might
not satisfy you.But
if Robert Plant
asked us how we know the Battle of Evermore didn’t really
happen, our answer
might not satisfy him either.
Linus, however —
who I did admit was smart
a little
while ago — appears to believe in the words he
recites.He also,
as we know from the
Hallowe’en special, believes just as fervently in the Great
Pumpkin — or, at
least, in the power of sincerity,
in which, at
his
age, he needs validation from a more powerful being to trust.All
of this can be
forgiven, because Linus is
seven years old.
And
Linus will be seven years
old again next year, and the
year after that.And
I wouldn’t have it
any other way.It
must be mentioned, though, that if he were
to grow
up,
he would be statistically the least
likely of all the Peanuts still to believe in God, since he appears to
have the
highest IQ.And in
this impossible
future, after barely escaping high school with his life, graduating
college
with highest honors in Philosophy, scraping through a grad
student’s existence
on a few hundred dollars a month, and having his heart broken numerous
times by
deathly pale girls who wear cat’s-eye glasses and decorate
their bedrooms with
pictures of Rimbaud and Bettie Page and smoke unfiltered cigarettes in
the bathtub — long after leaving the comforts of the human
race's original
“security blanket”
behind — Linus might once again be asked what Christmas is all
about.I think his
answer might be something like
the following.
Lights,
please.
“...Winter happens
because, for
part of the Earth’s rotation,
the Sun’s rays hit it less directly, making it colder on that
part of the
planet than it is during the rest of the year. The
difference in temperature is a pittance in the
grand scheme — a few dozen degrees — but makes an incredible
difference to living
things.
Most plants
die, and many
animals hibernate or otherwise seclude themselves. The
water on which all life depends freezes
into ice, and the moisture that remains in the air falls not as rain,
but as
snow — a sea of innumerable tiny, fragile solids that together
transform the
landscape’s diverse individualities into a single continuity;
its many colors,
into one color.
This
is neither good nor
bad, but simply the way things work in certain places on our little
planet. The
seedlings of the plants killed by the
first frost are insulated by the snow’s cover, and nourished
up through the
soil by its melting.
The
fat, furry
animals that live in these parts of the world exist in their present
forms partly
because of the winter, however little they may enjoy it.”
“But
human beings first
became distinct from
apes in the sun-soaked grasslands of Africa, courtesy of an
evolutionary
process called neoteny
— the retention of juvenile
characteristics into
adulthood.We
lost
the hair that we could
never have afforded to lose elsewhere on the planet, but
we also extended our capacity to learn, and greatly increased
both
our aptitude
for
teamwork and our need for community.Thus,
when ancient humans first traveled into parts of the world where winter
existed — driven by the hunt for resources, our natural
curiosity, or perhaps the
bitterness of some long, long forgotten feud — we were able to
clothe ourselves,
devise and build together shelters sufficient for the cold, and live in
them
together through those unforgiving months.”
“And if
bodily survival were all that humans
required, there would be no more to say.But
concerning all
manifestations of hardship and terror — most centrally death
itself, and winter
is the death of the year — humans have done and will always do
two things: seek
to augment the sum of our knowledge with answers to the questions of
why, and
utilize the knowledge we already have, or think we have, to devise ways
to make
them as bearable as possible. Thus,
the
earliest civilizations invented explanations for the existence of
winter. Several
such legends, from cultures that later ones presumed to call heathen or
barbarian, tell of a beautiful Nature spirit married to the Lord of the
Underworld and residing with him for a portion of the year — implying
that
humans have always desired our explanations, even for those things that
most
challenge and frighten us, to be rooted in the phenomenon of love as it
came to
be known to us.”
“Thus it was that humans devised wonderful
celebrations to be observed at such
time as
winter was at its darkest, noticing that the year’s shortest
day marked also
the time from which the days would continue one by one to lengthen, and
so
brought with it always the promise that the spring and the summer would
return.We were
able to look at the endless white
that logically meant only death and see a form of beauty as real as
any
other.The
Scandinavian Yule
celebrated the
gift of language
from the god Odin, who was said to visit houses in the form of a
bearded old
man and leave rune-shaped candy for the children.The
Celtic peoples had Lá
an Dreoilín, on which
the children wore masks and
ran from house
to house accompanied by musicians, and Hogmanay,
on which a visit from a friend was necessary to bring luck throughout
the coming
year.In parts of
central Asia, Pongal
was celebrated, with
the
daylong boiling of a sweet mixture of fruits, rice and milk; in other
parts, Sankranthi,
with the wearing
of
beautiful clothes.On
Korochun,
the Slavic peoples
danced
together with arms entwined, and burned fires in cemeteries to keep
their
ancestors
warm.In China,
Dōngzhi
was a day on which to
be with
family; In Japan, comic plays were staged in public all through that
longest
night, on which it was said the goddess Amaterasu
was tricked into seeing her own reflection in a mirror, and was so
inspired by
her own beauty that she returned to the world of the living.The
children of
the Germanic tribes left
shoe-shaped cakes by the hearth to welcome Perchta,
goddess of light, who would momentarily endow the wisest members of the
family
with the ability to predict the future.The
Roman Saturnalia
festival involved
merrymaking so great that masters even traded places with their slaves;
presents were given to children on the Juvenalia
day, which also marked the rebirth of sol
invictus, the undefeated
sun — December 25th.”
“When a
certain sect of
Jews accepted a
teacher and philosopher named Jesus, who stressed love and forgiveness
above
all things, as their messiah, they began to call themselves Christians,
and
their beliefs eventually spread across Europe, and many Winter Solstice
traditions were incorporated into an observation of his birth, the
Christ’s
Mass.When this
observance spread to
other continents, it likewise combined with sundry
celebrations long
practiced by the people in these places.Today, Christmas,
or its
equivalent in another language, is the term most commonly used in the
cold,
wintry parts of the world for the festivals that human beings have
always used
to brighten up what would otherwise be the most miserable time of the
year.We know it
isn’t really Jesus’s birthday, but
very little about the day and its value has anything directly to do
with Jesus
anyway — the feeling it gives us is very much in tune with what Jesus
is said to have taught, yes, but it is equally in tune with the things
that wise and good people of all faiths, or of no faith, have taught as
well.In all
places, throughout the
history of civilization and well before, human beings who were
completely
isolated from one another had all independently decided to reinvent the
darkest
time of the year, when the face of death is closest to our own, as a
celebration of all that makes life most worth living: warm
fires,
delicious
food, fine clothes, family, joy on the faces of children, dreams for
the
future, great art, and love.”