Bah! Humbug!
Why I won’t be celebrating Christmas this year
I will joyfully celebrate the fact that here, in the Northern Hemisphere, the number of hours of daylight is about to start increasing once more. The sun will rise above the hills to the east of my home a little earlier every day for the next six months. It will drop below the hills in the West a few seconds later each evening.
I take enormous pleasure in the knowledge that beneath the soil in my garden things are happening. Indeed, I already have daffodils in bud in one sheltered corner.
Above all, I will show gratitude for my good fortune in having all these things when so many do not. I’ll do that with donations to charity as well as presenting gifts to friends and relations. I’ll not go overboard, feeding the greed of corporate entities in an orgy of eating drinking and spending to excess.
As for celebrating the birth of a religious leader in a part of the world where, 2 millennia later, people are still killing each other in the name of religion, I can not bring myself to do that.
How anyone can stand in a church and sing about a birth that is supposed to signal ‘peace…