Subversive tendencies

Thanks for the comment Bruce. With your support I'm going ahead with this nonsense.

It's the day after Christmas and thank Jesus because now the public libraries are open again. I walked downtown today to pick up Naomi Wolf's book "The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot" and a book on how to teach yourself Arabic. I requested that Naomi Wolf book from the Western Mass library system after seeing her on the Colbert Report earlier this year (the YouTube link follows this post). While Ms. Wolf strikes me as a little nuts, her message sucked me right in. Unfortunately the only library in the Western Mass system to have a copy was in Amherst and there was a waiting list.

Daniela and I decided on Christmas Day to learn Arabic together, so I picked up a book with some CDs at the same time (I'm not going to stop learning Japanese, I'm just going to add Arabic to what I'm doing and I know how ridiculous that is). So, after leaving the library I stopped in at the Greenfield Farmer's Market to buy some green tea. While I was fumbling with my wallet at checkout, the girl at the register noticed both of my books: Introduction to Arabic and "The End of America." Yeah, that's right. I'm UP to stuff.

On Christmas Day, Daniela and I compromised on how to celebrate. We acknowledged Jesus Christ's divinity by eating Chinese food. That's your traditional Catholic/Jewish Christmas. While we walked down to the China Gourmet, we talked about Christian holidays (among other things). I said that they were actually a collection of pagan holidays and customs co-opted by Christians in order to teach and spread Christianity to pagan cultures. For example, both the hanging of mistletoe and the Christmas tree were pagan German traditions. Saint Boniface used the fir tree's triangular shape to help teach pagan Germans about Christ and they learned to revere it as a symbol as they had previously revered the Oak tree. December 25th was chosen as Christ's date of birth in the 3rd century because pagan Romans and Persians celebrated sun festivals around the same time. So, Christian traditions are actually a collection of pagan traditions subverted and redefined. We thought it was interesting. That's all.

Technorati tags: Naomi Wolf, The End of America, Christmas, Pagan