Christmas conundrum

As we move towards Christmas, I have no doubt that the usual e-mail chain letters will start doing the rounds again on the subject of governments wanting to remove from their public holiday lists the Christian celebrations of Christmas and Good Friday.

Is this another attack on Christianity? Or is it perhaps not?
Let us assume for the moment that in the spirit of the Vatican’s policy of reaching out to and 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 unlikely and somewhat absurd scenario is because right now, this is precisely what Christians expect other religions to do. Many Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Rastafarians, Shintos and others have no option but to stop working on the two main Christian public holidays: Christmas and Good Friday.

In past years, at roughly this time of the year, there have been flurries of e-mails doing the rounds in reaction to a Sunday newspaper report some time back about unconfirmed government plans all over the world 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 completely hysterically, by informal groups of concerned Christians asking their brethren to rise up and fight this notion.

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

But I suspect the very people who are so incensed about the prospect of removing Christians religious days from the official national holiday list are the very same people who 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.

What it boils down to is that these Christian soldiers basically want everyone in the world, irrespective of colour, race, creed, age or gender to down tools take Christmas Day offÑbut not to sing Christmas Carols, put decorations up in their lounges or support non-Christian shops flogging soap on a rope and other yuletide gifts that nobody ever seems to want.
t seems to me that a Christian who is serious about wanting to do something about reducing the crass commercialisation of Christmas, should give serious consideration to what the first logical step should be. And surely that is to restore Christmas to an essentially Christian celebration? The reason why Jewish, Muslim and Hindu holidays have not been commercialised to anything like the extent of Christmas is simply because they are celebrated only by those specific religions.
In South Africa, Christians and all other religions are protected by the Constitution from government attempts 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 activities political, sporting and religious against their will.
So it seems to me that in terms of our Constitution, which is considered to among the finest in the world (and particularly so in terms of the Church’s teaching to respect other religions), it makes no sense for us to continue to force non-Christians to take the day off work on our holy days.

I must admit, however, that if every Christian country in the world were to cut out all that crass commercialisation of Christmas, it would greatly exacerbate the problem of poverty, because it has been shown that the tradition of exchanging gifts at Christmas has sustained billions of jobs in every country in the world throughout the entire year.
So it is probably safe to assume that Jesus Christ 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.
But getting back to the flurry of e-mails doing the rounds: when you think about it, they are not only untruthful, but decidedly un-Christian.