Don’t you just want to smack them?  Their whole Christmas dinner is probably served on a bed of lettuce and followed by yoga.  You can be guaranteed that whatever is in that glass is diet and that man is not considering unbuttoning his pants.  They are having a ridiculously healthful Christmas.

That is what I’m going to have, and I will try to make the best of it.  I’m Celiac and allergic to milk and soy.  My son is just like me.  That leaves us very little traditional holiday fare.  No stuffing.  No pie.  No chocolates.  No egg nog.  No Butterball turkey…. The list goes on. I’ve never had figgy pudding, but I’m pretty confident it would kill me.   So what will we have?  Glad you asked!

This year, we are going to have a typically Nithemuka Christmas dinner.  I bought a chicken (because we just don’t have enough people to eat up a big turkey. )  I am going to make roast potatoes, yams, and veggies.  Desert was the hardest part.  What on earth could I serve that everyone could eat?  (And by everyone, I mean myself.  )  So I settled on a big fruit salad.  There will be mango, raspberries, peaches and orange slices.  Delicious!  And at the end of all the eating, I will not be ill and deeply regretting whatever passed my lips.  That night, I won’t be up all night with a sick child.  Merry Christmas to us!

While my Christmas dinner will be ridiculously healthful, I promise not to serve it on a bed of lettuce.  I furthermore guarantee that someone will have to undo a button!

Have you ever noticed that there tends to be a lot of stress around the idea of Christmas?  I don’t mean shopping, gifting and falling deeply into debt…. I mean, surrounding the whole idea of Christmas.  I can understand non-Christians declining to celebrate the birth of the Christian Messiah, but there is a whole other Christian school of thought that sees Christmas as a pagan holiday.

I’ve heard the horror stories…  Christmas is a part of Babylonian sun god worship, and little babies were sacrificed on that day… things like that.  Horrible stories that don’t seem to have ANY footnotes to back them up.  People just make these claims without giving any proof.  So if Christmas is indeed has some sort of horrible past, I could understand some qualms surrounding it… but does it?

These days it seems like a cursing to say “Merry Christmas.”  Again, I am not an insensitive person.  I wouldn’t push my holiday down the throat of someone who doesn’t believe in the celebrating of it.  But I sure wish we could all get on the same page.  Christians say it’s pagan.  Pagans (literal, card carrying Wiccans) say it’s Christian.  And it seems to have become taboo to enjoy a little egg nog and tinsel. 

I love Christmas.  I don’t think that Jesus was literally born on December 25, but I do think we could use a nice, festive holiday to look forward to in the winter cold.  And why not use it to thank God for the ultimate gift?  I love how people are kinder at Christmas and how even the most nominal believer looks up at the stars and thinks of God and a tiny baby born in the Middle East two thousand years ago. 

If December 25 was ever used for nasty things, I don’t think its very fair to hold it against the day.  If I hit someone in the head with a rock, would the rock be inherently evil?  Or would it still be a rock, a creation of God, that I chose to use to hurt someone? 

I don’t claim to be an expert on the subject, I’m just a little dubious about Youtube in a bibliography.  And I haven’t come across a source that I completely trust yet on the subject.   Too many people claim completely false things in order to make a point… or to make money…  or to get attention… or to feel special…  Who knows why they do it?  But your average person, like myself, can easily get bamboozled by a whole pile of “information” being dumped onto their laps.  Who knows what is true and what is not?  Who knows what can actually be backed up and what cannot?  Who knows what claims are legit?   I feel rather nervous around these information dumps that come to extreme conclusions. 

So here we have a holiday being disowned by Pagans and Christians alike.  A very nice holiday.  A holiday with presents and candles, the story of a newborn who change the world and a great big, festive feast.  I like this holiday.  I look forward to it all year long.  And I’m sad when it’s over.  It’s the one time of year that people, Christians or otherwise, give a care about the homeless, single moms and kids who don’t get breakfast.