Ban Christmas? Why not?

Let us assume for a moment that in the spirit of the Vatican’s policy of engaging with other religions, we Catholics were instructed by the Holy See to show our respect for those religions by observing their sacred holidays.

I have no doubt that Catholic businessmen would be outraged at having to be away from work so often, and that conservative Catholic laity would be incensed to the point of apoplexy.

My reason for presenting this somewhat absurd scenario is because right now, this is precisely what Christians expect other religions to do. Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Rastafarians, Shintos and others have no option but to stop working on the two main Christian holidays – Christmas and Good Friday.

In the past month there has been a flurry of e-mails doing the rounds in reaction to a Sunday newspaper report about unconfirmed government plans to abolish national public holidays such as Christmas and Good Friday. Interestingly enough, there has been not a word from any of the churches and these e-mails seem to have been written, sometimes hysterically, by informal groups of concerned Christians asking their brethren to rise up and fight this notion.

One can understand that the more conservative among us may take umbrage at government messing with such sacred religious feast days. After all, they might argue, South Africa is a predominantly Christian country and other religions should simply respect the will of the majority.

But I suspect the same people every year scream blue murder about how Christmas has become so commercialised and how other religions insult us by getting in on the act of exchanging gifts without the foggiest idea of why they’re doing it.

So, what it boils down to is that these conservative Christian soldiers basically want everyone to down tools and take Christmas Day off, but not to sing Christmas carols or support non-Christian shops flogging soap on a rope and other yuletide gifts that nobody ever seems to want.

Surely the first logical step is to restore Christmas to an essentially Christian celebration. Which should work, because Jewish, Muslim and Hindu holidays have not been commercialised to anything like the extent of Christmas because they are celebrated only by those specific groups.

In South Africa, religions are constitutionally protected from any government attempting to completely do away with religious holidays. Some of those e-mails seem to assume government wants to ban Christmas which they certainly don’t. But, South Africans are also protected by the constitution from being forced in any way to participate in any group political, sporting and religious against their will.

So, it seems to me that in terms of our constitution, which is considered to be among the finest in the world, and particularly in terms of the Church’s mandate to respect other religions, it makes no sense for us to continue to force non-Christians into taking the day off work on our holy days.

However, if every Christian country in the world cut out all that crass commercialisation of Christmas, it would greatly exacerbate the problem of poverty. It has been shown that the tradition of exchanging gifts at Christmas sustains billions of jobs throughout the year.

So it is probably safe to assume that Our Lord would not take offence at so many billions of non-Christians celebrating his birth without knowing it, because by doing so they are keeping billions more poor people in jobs.