I have been very busy, so haven’t been able to investigate what the fuss is all about that streams past my social-media feeds: something about a red take-away coffee cup not having snowflakes, Santa’s sleigh, and elves and all the other things the Bible mentions at Christmas time…
Being in the Southern-Hemisphere, where the majority of Christians live, it is easy to forget that Jesus was born in a heavy snowstorm when snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow.
It is also easy to forget that the best way to remember the point of Christmas is to have snowflakes on a coffee cup more than question the coffee-drinking, the cup’s recycling… Jesus must have said somewhere, “drink coffee from a snow-flaked coffee-cup to remember me” but, as I said, I’ve been too busy to find the reference. All that springs to my mind is more about how we might care for others and for the planet…
Oh, and down here, we haven’t even started Advent. In fact we haven’t even got to the end of this Church Year.
You can click on the above image to make it larger.
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On Christmas Day you can’t get sore
your fellow man you must adore
– there’s always time to rob him more
the other three hundred and sixty-four…
(Tom Lehrer)
I suspect (judgmental soul that I am) that the right wing culture warriors in the United States would be clueless as to what Advent is. The nonsensical level of this “debate” is laughable.
For what it’s worth, the plain red cups are very attractive, and I am enjoying many beverages in them to make up for the idiots who are boycotting, because they think that a lack of snowflakes is an attack on Jesus.
Lord have mercy!
One ironic oddity of American history is that the spiritual ancestors of today’s American evangelical “religious right” quite religiously started the “war on Christmas” — and not in defense of it!
The Puritans who settled New England banned the observance of Christmas as “unbiblical” and contemptuously called it “Foolstide.”
Celebrating Christmas was outlawed in Boston through 1681.
The Founding Fathers of the United States, supposedly a thoroughly Christian bunch (as evangelicals tell it), thought so little of Christmas, they treated it as an ordinary working day on which Congress met, even after the U.S. Constitution came into effect.
Christmas wasn’t a public holiday anywhere in the United States until 1836, when Alabama became the first state to declare it one.
The federal government of the United States didn’t follow suit until 1870.
There’s long been a “war on Christmas” in America — but one started by radical Protestants!
And so these latest “cultural warriors” doth protest too much…
Such an interesting point, Gregory. Thanks. I haven’t checked for a while, but there used to be Protestant churches in NZ that did have a church service on Christmas Day. Jehovah’s Witnesses, of course, don’t celebrate Christmas. I wonder if there is a USA connection in that decision. Blessings.