Here's what one resident of a local community had to say about this subject recently:
[color:blue]Hand-wringers ruining Christmas celebrations


The 12 Days of Giving have replaced the 12 Days of Christmas, as far as the Royal Canadian Mint is concerned. On Vancouver Island, a school board has decided that school Christmas concerts are not politically correct. Why, the very mention of the word Christmas might offend someone in our multi-cultural, multi-faith society.

Welcome to the silly season.

Have you noticed that the objections to the use of the word Christmas don’t seem to come from the Muslim, Jewish, Sikh, Hindu or Buddhist communities? People of those faiths are able to respect the religious basis for the Christmas season without feeling their own religious beliefs are threatened.

Instead, the objections to Christmas are coming from those perennial, some might even say professional, tongue-cluckers and humourless handwringers who seek to destroy every ounce of joy, tradition and soul in our holiday celebrations.

Basically, the calls to eliminate Christmas appear to come from two groups of people:
    a) members of small, obscure organizations with too much time on their hands, or
    b) high-ranking officials in the federal civil service with too much time on their hands.[/LIST]Are these two groups interchangeable? Could they, perhaps, be the same people? We hereby offer our services to take a million or two of the Chretien government’s grant funding to investigate the situation and find answers to those burning questions. In the interests of fairness and equality — those are the ultimate goals of the hand-wringer , right? — we shouldn’t stop with eliminating references to Christianity. If we’re going to clean house, let’s really clean house. Let’s eliminate all religious references from society.

    For starters, you can kiss Tuesdays goodbye. Tuesdays are named for the Germanic war god Tiw or Tyr, who received sacrifices of hanged men. What could be more politically incorrect than naming an entire day for the god of war?

    In our brave new and completely secular world, the famous sculpture in the Louvre will have to be renamed “The armless woman de Milo.” We don’t want any references to Venus, the Roman goddess of love, cluttering up impressionable minds.

    Our maps will look different, too. No more Corpus Christi, Texas, no more San Francisco, San Diego, San Juan, Santa Fe or St. Petersburg. The name Athens has got to go, too, Olympic Games or no Olympic Games. Athena may have been the goddess of wisdom and crafts, but she was still a goddess.

    The name of the Olympics will have to change, too. Those Greek gods again. Furthermore, drivers of Mercury cars will be required to turn in their vehicles for less offensive models.

    Nor should we limit ourselves to Western deities. From now on, all Chinese restaurants should be required to remove Buddha’s Feast from their menus. This dish could be construed as an insidious attempt to indoctrinate unsuspecting diners into the dharma. Talk about an inside job!

    We only need to recall the immortal words of another sage - you are what you eat.

    But that’s the topic for another well-funded investigation...

    WF.

    (“Lillooet News”, December 11, 2002)
In His Grace,

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simul iustus et peccator

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