Just days after an investigation over football game attendees flashing the now-controversial 'a-ok' sign, the spotlight has shifted to a discussion over Santa's hat. The drama began after this small icon appeared in place of the usual one on the internet site Github:
More specifically, a developer replaced the ordinary gear icon in the interface with another featuring a Santa hat, presumably in honor of the Christmas season. One user responded, saying that the gesture was "very offensive":
Following the complaint, the icon with the Santa hat was removed.
It is easy to miss the importance of what is going on here, especially because this is all taking place in a corner of the web that the general public is not likely to frequent. But bear in mind that Github is owned by Microsoft, the multi-national tech giant with investments in Apple, AT&T and Comcast, and a great deal of power to influence culture and society through its web of control. That said, a new trend pointing towards limiting the visibility of "Christmas-themed whatever" could have major, long-term implications; just think of all the cultural lore out there surrounding Christmas - aside from Thanksgiving, it is among the last vestiges of shared community culture in the U.S. that have survived despite the progression towards a politically-correct and irreligious public sphere:
Of course, with some degree of religious ambiguity, and its connection to economic activity, the pageantry associated with Christmas might be spared the ax. Then again, religion is in the background. Somewhere.
And, with Santa, we have a non-gender-fluid, patriarchal, white, married and presumably straight male - a man whose legacy is almost exclusively an outgrowth of a shared European cultural tradition:
That does not bode well with the new era, or the philosophies we are supposed to carry into it.
Furthermore, Christmas has inspired various cultural expressions from the European soul - dramatic Russian ballets (Tchaikovsky's 'Nutcracker') caroling tunes adopted from the British Isles (i.e. 'What Child Is This?'/'Greensleeves'),German and Austrian choir hymns and French contributions ('O' Holy Night'/'Minuit, chretiens') - with translations and adaptations shared throughout the European-settled world. What this means is Christmas culture leads to an understanding of commonality, while at the same time building up points of shared identity that set this community apart from the rest of the world. And, for those who belong to the cultures that produced these great works, it is something that one can take pride in being a part of.
Judging from my discovery that German public television actually airs the Holocaust film Schindler's List on Christmas Day, I would venture to guess that the barriers of this community-conscious, or the discovery of pride-inspiring creations by the European soul, is particularly welcome. We are probably supposed to play songs from that Holocaust movie around Christmas. After all, is that not what "never forget" means? To never forget?
All that brings us to the outrage over the Santa hat, because the Github user who complained presents Christmas in a way that is likely to make people reject it. According to the link the user provides:
But if you take away the pageantry of Christmas, all that remains of shared culture-community in the U.S. is Thanksgiving, and that holiday is already on the chopping block because of the history involved, beyond the celebrated narrative. So, this is really all not so different from the controversy over whether to rename Houston, or to tear down landmarks and statues that commemorate "white nationalist slave owners" such as the Founding Fathers (ex: Monticello); perhaps we would be wise to treat it as such.
After all, we must take a stand in defense of the family-gathering, feasting, fun, innocence and frivolity that is Christmas as we know it, before it is all eliminated - just like Microsoft eliminated the Santa hat, and all traces of the dispute:
What the people do not know they will not resist. And they will continue to assume their traditions are safe. We must show that will will not be intimidated, and defend the culture and traditions we love.
As you can see, this goes far beyond flashing signs for lulz (even if the a-ok thing was never just about that); so wear your Santa hat with pride, and make it a symbol of our people - a sign that we are not going anywhere, and that we will not be replaced.
More specifically, a developer replaced the ordinary gear icon in the interface with another featuring a Santa hat, presumably in honor of the Christmas season. One user responded, saying that the gesture was "very offensive":
Following the complaint, the icon with the Santa hat was removed.
It is easy to miss the importance of what is going on here, especially because this is all taking place in a corner of the web that the general public is not likely to frequent. But bear in mind that Github is owned by Microsoft, the multi-national tech giant with investments in Apple, AT&T and Comcast, and a great deal of power to influence culture and society through its web of control. That said, a new trend pointing towards limiting the visibility of "Christmas-themed whatever" could have major, long-term implications; just think of all the cultural lore out there surrounding Christmas - aside from Thanksgiving, it is among the last vestiges of shared community culture in the U.S. that have survived despite the progression towards a politically-correct and irreligious public sphere:
Of course, with some degree of religious ambiguity, and its connection to economic activity, the pageantry associated with Christmas might be spared the ax. Then again, religion is in the background. Somewhere.
And, with Santa, we have a non-gender-fluid, patriarchal, white, married and presumably straight male - a man whose legacy is almost exclusively an outgrowth of a shared European cultural tradition:
Furthermore, Christmas has inspired various cultural expressions from the European soul - dramatic Russian ballets (Tchaikovsky's 'Nutcracker') caroling tunes adopted from the British Isles (i.e. 'What Child Is This?'/'Greensleeves'),German and Austrian choir hymns and French contributions ('O' Holy Night'/'Minuit, chretiens') - with translations and adaptations shared throughout the European-settled world. What this means is Christmas culture leads to an understanding of commonality, while at the same time building up points of shared identity that set this community apart from the rest of the world. And, for those who belong to the cultures that produced these great works, it is something that one can take pride in being a part of.
Judging from my discovery that German public television actually airs the Holocaust film Schindler's List on Christmas Day, I would venture to guess that the barriers of this community-conscious, or the discovery of pride-inspiring creations by the European soul, is particularly welcome. We are probably supposed to play songs from that Holocaust movie around Christmas. After all, is that not what "never forget" means? To never forget?
All that brings us to the outrage over the Santa hat, because the Github user who complained presents Christmas in a way that is likely to make people reject it. According to the link the user provides:
Many who are excitedly preparing for their Christmas celebrations would prefer not knowing about the holiday’s real significance. If they do know the history, they often object that their celebration has nothing to do with the holiday’s monstrous history and meaning. “We are just having fun.”The important thing to realize here is how common it is, historically, to try to tear down old culture by getting the culture's adherents to question and ultimately reject their ways, only to bring in a new culture that is not held up to the same scrutiny, with principles you dare not question (like theories of anti-Semitism and memorialization of the Holocaust). That is how culture conquest functions, and has functioned for centuries.
Imagine that between 1933-45, the Nazi regime celebrated Adolf Hitler’s birthday – April 20 – as a holiday. Imagine that they named the day, “Hitlerday,” and observed the day with feasting, drunkenness, gift-giving, and various pagan practices. Imagine that on that day, Jews were historically subject to perverse tortures and abuse, and that this continued for centuries.
Now, imagine that your great-great-great-grandchildren were about to celebrate Hitlerday. April 20th arrived. They had long forgotten about Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen. They had never heard of gas chambers or death marches. They had purchased champagne and caviar, and were about to begin the party when someone reminded them of the day’s real history and their ancestors’ agony. Imagine that they initially objected, “We aren’t celebrating the Holocaust; we’re just having a little Hitlerday party.” If you could travel forward in time and meet them; if you could say a few words to them, what would you advise them to do on Hitlerday?
On December 25, 1941, Julius Streicher, one of the most vicious of Hitler’s assistants, celebrated Christmas by penning the following editorial in his rabidly Anti-Semitic newspaper, Der Stuermer:
“If one really wants to put an end to the continued prospering of this curse from heaven that is the Jewish blood, there is only one way to do it: to eradicate this people, this Satan’s son, root and branch.”It was an appropriate thought for the day. This Christmas, “how will we celebrate?”
The Christmas Challenge
How Did Christmas Come to Be Celebrated on December 25?
- Christmas has always been a holiday celebrated carelessly. For millennia, pagans, Christians, and even Jews have been swept away in the season’s festivities, and very few people ever pause to consider the celebration’s intrinsic meaning, history, or origins.
- Christmas celebrates the birth of Jesus, a Christian god who came to rescue mankind from the “curse of the Torah.”
- At its origin, Christmas is a 24-hour declaration that Judaism is no longer valid.
- December 25 is a day on which Jews have been shamed, tortured, and murdered.
- Many of the most popular Christmas customs - including Christmas trees, mistletoe, Christmas presents, and Santa Claus - are modern incarnations of some extremely offensive and violent rituals
The Origins of Christmas Customs
- Roman pagans first introduced the holiday of Saturnalia, a week long period of lawlessness celebrated between December 17-25. The festival began when Roman authorities chose “an enemy of the Roman people” to represent the “Lord of Misrule.” Each Roman community selected a victim whom they forced to indulge in food and other physical pleasures throughout the week. At the festival’s conclusion, December 25th, Roman authorities believed they were destroying the forces of darkness by brutally murdering this innocent man or woman.
- The ancient Greek writer poet and historian Lucian (in his dialogue entitled Saturnalia) describes the festival’s observance in his time. In addition to human sacrifice, he mentions these customs: widespread intoxication; going from house to house while singing naked; rape and another sexual license; and consuming human-shaped biscuits - i.e. Ginger Bread cookies.
- In the 4th century CE, Christianity imported the Saturnalia festival hoping to take the pagan masses in with it. Christian leaders succeeded in converting to Christianity large numbers of pagans by promising them that they could continue to celebrate the Saturnalia as Christians.[4]
- The problem was that there was nothing intrinsically Christian about Saturnalia. To remedy this, these Christian leaders named Saturnalia’s concluding day, December 25th, to be Yaishu’ birthday.
- Christians had little success, however, refining the practices of Saturnalia. As Stephen Nissenbaum, professor history at the University of Massachussetts, Amherst, writes, “In return for ensuring massive observance of the anniversary of the Savior’s birth by assigning it to this resonant date, the Church for its part tacitly agreed to allow the holiday to be celebrated more or less the way it had always been.” The earliest Christmas holidays were celebrated by drinking, sexual indulgence, singing naked in the streets (a precursor of modern caroling), etc.
- The Reverend Increase Mather of Boston observed in 1687 that “the early Christians who first observed the Nativity on December 25 did not do so thinking that Christ was born in that Month, but because the Heathens’ Saturnalia was at that time kept in Rome, and they were willing to have those Pagan Holidays metamorphosed into Christian ones.”[5] Because of its known pagan origin, Christmas was banned by the Puritans and its observance was illegal in Massachusetts between 1659 and 1681.[6] However, Christmas was and still is celebrated by most Christians.
- Some of the most offensive customs of the Saturnalia carnival were intentionally revived by the Catholic Church in 1466 when Pope Paul II, for the amusement of his Roman citizens, forced Jews to race naked through the streets of the city. An eyewitness account reports, “Before they were to run, the Jews were richly fed, so as to make the race more difficult for them and at the same time more amusing for spectators. They ran… amid Rome’s taunting shrieks and peals of laughter, while the Holy Father stood upon a richly ornamented balcony and laughed heartily.”[7]
- As part of the Saturnalia carnival throughout the 18th and 19th centuries CE, rabbis of the ghetto in Rome were forced to wear clownish outfits and march through the city streets to the jeers of the crowd, pelted by a variety of missiles. When the Jewish community of Rome sent a petition in 1836 to Pope Gregory XVI begging him to stop the annual Saturnalia abuse of the Jewish community, he responded, “It is not opportune to make any innovation.”[8] On December 25, 1881, Christian leaders whipped the Polish masses into Anti-Semitic frenzies that led to riots across the country. In Warsaw 12 Jews were brutally murdered, huge numbers maimed, and many Jewish women were raped. Two million rubles worth of property was destroyed.[9]
Just as early Christians recruited Roman pagans by associating Christmas with the Saturnalia, so too worshippers of the Asheira cult and its offshoots were recruited by the Church sanctioning “Christmas Trees”.[10] Pagans had long worshipped trees in the forest, or brought them into their homes and decorated them, and this observance was adopted and painted with a Christian veneer by the Church.
- The Origin of Christmas Tree
Norse mythology recounts how the god Balder was killed using a mistletoe arrow by his rival god Hoder while fighting for the female Nanna. Druid rituals use mistletoe to poison their human sacrificial victim.[11] The Christian custom of “kissing under the mistletoe” is a later synthesis of the sexual license of Saturnalia with the Druidic sacrificial cult.[12]
- The Origin of Mistletoe
In pre-Christian Rome, the emperors compelled their most despised citizens to bring offerings and gifts during the Saturnalia (in December) and Kalends (in January). Later, this ritual expanded to include gift-giving among the general populace. The Catholic Church gave this custom a Christian flavor by re-rooting it in the supposed gift-giving of Saint Nicholas (see below).[13]
- The Origin of Christmas Presents
Nicholas was born in Parara, Turkey in 270 CE and later became Bishop of Myra. He died in 345 CE on December 6th. He was only named a saint in the 19th century.
- The Origin of Santa Claus
Nicholas was among the most senior bishops who convened the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE and created the New Testament. The text they produced portrayed Jews as “the children of the devil”[14] who sentenced Yaishu to death.
In 1087, a group of sailors who idolized Nicholas moved his bones from Turkey to a sanctuary in Bari, Italy. There Nicholas supplanted a female boon-giving deity called The Grandmother, or Pasqua Epiphania, who used to fill the children's stockings with her gifts. The Grandmother was ousted from her shrine at Bari, which became the center of the Nicholas cult. Members of this group gave each other gifts during a pageant they conducted annually on the anniversary of Nicholas’ death, December 6.
The Nicholas cult spread north until it was adopted by German and Celtic pagans. These groups worshipped a pantheon led by Woden –their chief god and the father of Thor, Balder, and Tiw. Woden had a long, white beard and rode a horse through the heavens one evening each Autumn. When Nicholas merged with Woden, he shed his Mediterranean appearance, grew a beard, mounted a flying horse, rescheduled his flight for December, and donned heavy winter clothing.
In a bid for pagan adherents in Northern Europe, the Catholic Church adopted the Nicholas cult and taught that he did (and they should) distribute gifts on December 25th instead of December 6th.
In 1809, the novelist Washington Irving (most famous his The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle) wrote a satire of Dutch culture entitled Knickerbocker History. The satire refers several times to the white bearded, flying-horse riding Saint Nicholas using his Dutch name, Santa Claus.
Dr. Clement Moore, a professor at Union Seminary, read Knickerbocker History, and in 1822 he published a poem based on the character Santa Claus: “Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, in the hope that Saint Nicholas soon would be there…” Moore innovated by portraying a Santa with eight reindeer who descended through chimneys.
The Bavarian illustrator Thomas Nast almost completed the modern picture of Santa Claus. From 1862 through 1886, based on Moore’s poem, Nast drew more than 2,200 cartoon images of Santa for Harper’s Weekly. Before Nast, Saint Nicholas had been pictured as everything from a stern looking bishop to a gnome-like figure in a frock. Nast also gave Santa a home at the North Pole, his workshop filled with elves, and his list of the good and bad children of the world. All Santa was missing was his red outfit.
In 1931, the Coca Cola Corporation contracted the Swedish commercial artist Haddon Sundblom to create a coke-drinking Santa. Sundblom modeled his Santa on his friend Lou Prentice, chosen for his cheerful, chubby face. The corporation insisted that Santa’s fur-trimmed suit be bright, Coca Cola red. And Santa was born – a blend of Christian crusader, pagan god, and commercial idol.
But if you take away the pageantry of Christmas, all that remains of shared culture-community in the U.S. is Thanksgiving, and that holiday is already on the chopping block because of the history involved, beyond the celebrated narrative. So, this is really all not so different from the controversy over whether to rename Houston, or to tear down landmarks and statues that commemorate "white nationalist slave owners" such as the Founding Fathers (ex: Monticello); perhaps we would be wise to treat it as such.
After all, we must take a stand in defense of the family-gathering, feasting, fun, innocence and frivolity that is Christmas as we know it, before it is all eliminated - just like Microsoft eliminated the Santa hat, and all traces of the dispute:
What the people do not know they will not resist. And they will continue to assume their traditions are safe. We must show that will will not be intimidated, and defend the culture and traditions we love.
