"Christmas" cards
Dec. 29th, 2005 01:18 pmWe must have got 50-60 Christmas cards this year, and a quick glance around the living-room reveals that only two of them have any sort of Christ / Nativity / religious theme to the picture. (Or maybe two-and-a-half if you count one that depicts three cartoon penguins with crowns on looking up at a star.) Those two both came from explicitly Christian charities.
Have our friends been deliberately avoiding religious-themed cards, on the basis of not being [especially] religious themselves? Or is it just next-to-impossible to buy religious-themed cards these days? I got mine from Oxfam as usual, and none of their range had any religious content at all, which I guess is a policy decision -- but I don't remember it being quite so much like this last year.
I haven't counted up how many of them say things like "Season's Greetings" rather than "Happy Christmas" inside, but I bet it's most.
I find this a bit sad in a way. I know Christians hijacked the pagan midwinter festival season in the first place, but even so it seems rather pitiful to slip unnoticed out of the picture without even a whimper. I guess the disjuncture between orgy of consumerism and birth of redeemer just snapped under its own tension.
Have our friends been deliberately avoiding religious-themed cards, on the basis of not being [especially] religious themselves? Or is it just next-to-impossible to buy religious-themed cards these days? I got mine from Oxfam as usual, and none of their range had any religious content at all, which I guess is a policy decision -- but I don't remember it being quite so much like this last year.
I haven't counted up how many of them say things like "Season's Greetings" rather than "Happy Christmas" inside, but I bet it's most.
I find this a bit sad in a way. I know Christians hijacked the pagan midwinter festival season in the first place, but even so it seems rather pitiful to slip unnoticed out of the picture without even a whimper. I guess the disjuncture between orgy of consumerism and birth of redeemer just snapped under its own tension.