R-0006: The Holiday Horseshoe
I have become aware in recent years of an argument made by edgy online skeptics, who are all good boys and deserve cookies from Mr. Richard Dawkins himself, that all Christian holidays, but Christmas and Easter especially, are merely reskinned versions of indigenous pre-Christian holidays of the Mediterranean Basin and Europe. It is not clear to me what point this argument serves, except, perhaps, to "own the religious" in some display of false, humanist bravado. The "War on Christmas" which I was raised a perpetual soldier in, does not require a return volley from the agnostic: culture-warring Christians are entirely capable of making fools of themselves on their own.
However, beyond the rhetorical uselessness of this line of attack, I am always amused when I see this argument levied at some Christian practitioner, as this point is made equally strongly, and with more fervour and seriousness, by those within the extremes of the religion than those without. It seems unlikely to me that most internet atheists actually want to see the celebration of an annual winter holiday come to an end; unlike the Addams family, to whom the holidays were as garlic was to a vampire.
The reader may recall two members of the Addams family, discussed in R-0003, who were both determined to learn how to operate a sound system from Jezebel, and equally determined to pretend that it was Isaac teaching them these secrets.
While the Addams' were considered a permanent part of the congregation at our Households of Faith church, their attendance was sporadic, due in no small part to their convictions that the major holidays of the Christian liturgical calendar were Papist Idolatries and Pagan Perversions. While the church was entirely non-liturgical, some small lip service was paid to the major holidays: one year on Easter, the preaching elder of the week somehow managed to shoehorn a salvation message and a denouncement of the Islam into his sermon on Genesis 3:7, "Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths."¹
Far worse than the tepid gestures towards a traditional celebration of the church holidays was the decorations. If we had still been meeting in someone's house at this point, the Addams family may have tolerated a touch of ye olde heathenry; but since the traditionalist congregation which owned the building we used in the afternoons decorated for the church festivals with all the gusto of a small, rural town, we would not see the Addams during Lent, Easter, Advent, or Christmas time.
This was the normal experience for the first few years they attended the church: however, one year they made the sudden decision to come for an Advent period service. One of the elders, Loin Man, received a call: the Addams family would be attending the service that day, and they would be arriving in ten minutes.
What followed was the most ecumenical cooperation I ever witnessed in that congregation. Adults and children sprinted around the building, stuffing pointsettias behind the organ, moving the Nativity creche into the electrical closet, and valiantly - and repeatedly - thrusting the Christmas tree in retrofitted elevator meant for the wheelchair-bound congregants of the main church. Paper angels and snowflakes and red ribbons and garlands were banished into the accessible bathroom, which resembled nothing more than a Christmas oubliette for the rest of the afternoon.
When the Addams family entered ten minutes later, the sanctuary was stripped bare of tinsel, greenery, and anything that could remotely be construed as festive, joyous, or loosely related to Baby Jesus. Even the cross had been stripped of its dark blue shroud, one of the traditional colours of Advent.
They entered the sanctuary led by their patriarch, the girls in their usual horrid acid-wash jean jumpers, sickly pink turtlenecks, white tights, and unbound stringy hair; the boys in their khaki cargo pants and polo shirts and smug superiority all over their faces. After looking around for a moment, the patriarch determined that the sanctuary was safe, and they assumed their normal place in the third and fourth rows of pews on the right hand side of the church.
I directed the audience to stand, and started improvising a new worship set - one that absolutely did not include any traditional Christmas hymns - and tried to ignore the hearty off-tune singing coming from the Addams' family. I would not have to suffer for long.
As the patriarch made his joyful bellows and read from the screen, his eyes narrowed. Somewhere above the stage, just next to a storage door, hovered a single, white, tissue-paper angel, gently turning on its fishing line in the ambient air current. It had been overlooked in the panic to undecorated the church.
There was no scene, argument, or explanation offered. He stopped singing, turned quickly and decisively, and led his family out of the congregation like a line of petulant geese. In their passing, the double hinged doors of the congregation flapped back and forth, creaking and groaning.
The service resumed without comment, as services do. The angel remained there, gently rotating, presiding over the remainder of the service with the quiet conviction ascribed to the Holy Spirit. After the service ended, we spent an hour trying to undo the profanity we inflicted on the church building so that the main congregation would not know about our extremism.
I do not tell this story primarily to mock the Addams family, though the patriarch especially deserves it, that piggish man. Nor do I tell it to defend Christmas, which requires no defense, least of all from people who will celebrate it anyway while insisting they would prefer not to. I tell it because it clarified something for me that no internet argument ever has: the fiercest objections to religious symbolism and human celebration rarely come from those outside the faith, but from those who believe they are guarding it from contamination.
These are the Christians the world should be afraid of, because for every Addams family that exists, there is an entire ecosystem of Christians ready and willing to accommodate and support them.
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