RE: [Wikipedia-l] Religious intolerance

I. Christmas is the holiday previously known as Yule or Yuletide. It was a northern European seasonal festival since time immemorial. If (and only if) you consider Yuletide to have been a religious holiday, it was a NON-Christian religious holiday. But AFAIK Yuletide was a seasonal festival in the first instance -- only possibly with associated (non-Christian) religious connotations in the second instance. II. Yuletide became known as Christmas thanks to the goody old three-E-method (of latter-day Microsoft fame): Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. The Christian church of the day was running a major conversion effort. They quickly found they couldn't beat old and cherished traditions such as Yuletide. So they accepted it as a legitimate festival into the church calendar, they added Christian symbolism and merged it with Christian ideology (most notably the holiday was "calculated"/defined to match Jesus of Nazareth's birth), and finally the entire festival got usurped and monopolized by Christianity. (Yuletide symbols/traditions such as Christmas trees and mistletoe still remain. Even Santa Claus is based on a Yuletide figure, I hear.) Why am I telling you this? Well, IMHO "Christmas" is in actuality a quite secular festival. It ''used to be such'' before those Christian missionaries came to northern Europe and ''it is again today''. Millions if not billions of non-Christians happily celebrate Christmas all over the world. Which leads to another point I'd like to make: IMHO "Christmas" (or "xmas") has become a GENERIC term and to many, many people all over the world "Christmas" simply denotes the festival around this time in the year (which again was previously known as Yuletide), and to many, many non-Christians it doesn't matter in the least that etymologically speaking the word "Christmas" carries with it that later added Christian connotation. For example millions of Japanese Shinto-Buddhists are quite happy to celebrate Christmas without wanting to become Christians. I too am quite happy to celebrate Christmas (and to call it "Christmas"), despite me being a budding polytheist whose religious beliefs and ethics are decidedly at odds with Christian ones. And it's not just me to think so: Some French school recently found itself challenged (in protest) by pupils to remove a Christmas tree as a supposedly "conspicuous religious symbol". The tree was restored after it was officially ruled that Christmas trees are pagan symbols: http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/05E40EA7-8A8C-486E-BF0E -8F257310AB5E.htm IMHO braindead practices of avoiding to say "Merry Christmas" (spearheaded by corporate America, for fear of some dimwitted non-Christian suing) actually REINFORCE the mistaken perception of Christmas as a Christian holiday. ("Happy Holidays." Oh feck off.) I mean, I'm not trying to be a spoilsport to Christians here. If you're Christian and you consider Christmas a Christian holiday, well, fine by me. Just don't expect everybody else to agree. For the above reasons, I believe any and all concerns over Gerard's very nice, harmless and well-intended "Merry Christmas and happy New Year"-project (http://it.wiktionary.org/wiki/Buon_Natale_e_felice_Anno_Nuovo%21) are totally unnecessary and inappropriate. Only someone ignorant of both the origins of Christmas and the extent to which Christmas is presently celebrated by followers of the majority of non-Christian religions of the world could have found fault with Gerard's idea. Thank you Gerard. :) Merry Christmas and a happy New Year !!! :-) :) :-D -- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]] www.ropersonline.com _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l