Christmas

"the separation of church and song" and/or unintended consequences?

The inescapable and ubiquitous Christmas songs, specials, etc -- and how us Jews helped create and embed them, have fought against them, and how some deal with it now -- fa-who dor-ay, fa-who dor-ay, ...

The white Christmases that Irving Berlin dreamed of weren't the earliest ones he used to know. ... watching his neighbors burn his family's house to the ground in a good old-fashioned, Jew-hating pogrom.
So it's no surprise that when Berlin got around to writing his great Christmas song in 1941, nearly half a century after his family had fled the shtetl of Mohilev for New York's Lower East Side, it was flatly devoid of Christian imagery. It is, for all that, a religious song. ...

The Golden Compass: The Movie

Here's the trailer.

Release is scheduled for December, in plenty of time for the War on shopping Christmas, which of late has formed such an endearing part of our Holiday season here in the States.

The Christianists are going to hate this one, and they're going to go even more batshit than they usually are.

Why? Here's a profile of the author, Philip Pullman:

Today's Volley in the War on Christmas

This little piece from the Department of Extremely Obvious Things causes me to want to ask a question. I know we've got the occasional Christian and Christianist reader here (although, one less, it seems) and here's what I want you to tell me: upon what does your belief that Jesus Christ was a real person rest? I'm not trying to be snarky here, I'm curious.