Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:<\/p>\n
Before \u201cA Christmas Carol,\u201d the holiday of Christmas in the English-speaking world was nothing to get excited about.\u00a0 The important event in Christianity was rising from the dead, at Easter.<\/p>\n
We know, of course, that Catholics hyped Christmas in pagan lands to compete with the winter solstice, adopted the Tanenbaum as the Christmas Tree, and somehow conflated the stories of King Wenceslas, Bishop Nicholas, Father Christmas and Kris Kringle into Santa Claus, made famous in America by the Coca Cola advertising campaign.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s our last surviving holiday.\u00a0 Easter is too Christian, Fourth of July is too jingoistic, Halloween is offensive to Wiccans, Thanksgiving \u2013 don\u2019t even get me started on cultural genocide.\u00a0 Christmas \u2013 with Frosty and Rudolph and the Grinch \u2013 brings back childhood memories of a time when there was magic in the world and if you could stay awake late enough, you\u2019d see Santa with your own eyes.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s why Christmas decorations appear in the stores before Halloween, why Christmas sales make or break retailers, and why Christmas credit card debt is the leading cause of family stress leading to February bankruptcies and divorces . . . we\u2019re desperately trying to hang onto one thin sliver of happiness, one day of relief from the endless grinding politically correct bullshit all the rest of the year, trying to escape the lives people lived before \u201cA Christmas Carol.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The capacity of the American Left to impose misery on their fellow humans – and to get their little dollop of joy from it – may be the thing that bothers me the most about progressives; see also Public Radio’s six week long annual litany of holiday miseries that commenced on Friday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: Before \u201cA Christmas Carol,\u201d the holiday of Christmas in the English-speaking world was nothing to get excited about.\u00a0 The important event in Christianity was rising from the dead, at Easter. We know, of course, that Catholics hyped Christmas in pagan lands to compete with the winter solstice, adopted the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68639","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68639","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=68639"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68639\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68640,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68639\/revisions\/68640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=68639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=68639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=68639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}