Merry Christmas or Happy Christmas or whatever you might say in your neighborhood. Or not.
Those of us here in the United States have a way of assuming that folks everywhere do things in the same fashion that we do. And then we beat ourselves up for this notion. However, I'm thinking that this might just be simply human nature rather than American stupidity, because I think as a rule, we probably believe that everyone is going through the same stuff that we are.
For example, I have a couple of coworkers that (obviously) live in the same area that I do, except that they live to the south of me. We generally experience the same weather.
Last year, though.... One of our coworkers is originally from Russia. North of the Arctic Circle. Bloody ******* cold Russia. Chicago had experienced one of the worst cold winters on record. So cold, in fact, that it was warmer north of the Arctic Circle- where our coworker hails from.
Perceptions and your reality are not universal truth.
As John Lennon said, "So this is Christmas".
Christmas is most likely unknown in some parts of the world, and misunderstood or maligned where it is known. In the United States, which is probably the "Christmas Capitol of the World" (I just made that up, but it's probably accurate), Christmas has become so secularized and commercialized that, like Halloween and Easter, not much seems to be left of its real meaning.
Therefore, I've decided to make a sort of peace with the two versions of Christmas: the secular and the sacred.
The secular: I enjoy this simply because it is so joyful and peaceful on a number of levels. For starters, it's about winter in the northern hemisphere- something that is quite familiar to me. The scent of pine has always been pleasant to me, and the effect is compounded in the brisk, wintry air. I also love the music of Christmas- a great deal of it. There have been some real stinkers that have come out (Santa Baby, and The Most Wonderful Time of the Year come to mind immediately).
Folks tend to be a bit more divided about movies, though, because although its generally pretty easy to tell that a song is a Christmas song, the criteria for Christmas movies is pretty much a grey area. For example, apart from movies which actually feature the story of the birth of Jesus, we're left with a pretty large collection of movies which either deal with the secular version of Christmas, or merely occur around Christmas. I'm not a real movie fan, but two of my favorite movies fit into the latter category- they occur around Christmas: Die Hard, and Lethal Weapon. And for the record, I do NOT like Elf.
As for the real "reason for the season," I think the Bible explains it better than I can.
As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.
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