Christmas; You’re Not Currier & Ives
By John Sammon
12-20-2025
Every year I threaten to ignore Christmas.
I never do.
Ignoring Christmas is not easy. Doing so makes you about as popular as if you hated Disneyland. Your children if you ignore Christmas without buying them presents; they run off to their rooms and cry.
Your wife asks you for a divorce. You didn’t buy her a diamond.
You’re an ogre, a villain, or even worse…Scrooge. This is a ritual that must be observed. But let’s look at it common-scensically.
If one was honest, one would have to admit that Christmas, the biggest holiday of the year, is full of ironies, and has been twisted from its original intent into something else.
Now hear me out.
Christmas was originally merely a holiday to celebrate the birth of a Galilean (Israel) holy man whom scholars tell us was probably born between six and four BC (means Years Before Christ). How can you be born four years before your birth?
Or the newly adopted label of BCE (means Before the Common Era).
What the hell is a Common Era? The morons that make these labels don’t know, any more than they do about the specifics of Jesus’ life.
Jesus most evidently preached kindness, frugality and humility.
So of course it makes sense that we celebrate the birth of Jesus with the purchase of hundreds of dollars of merchandise, much of it made by Chinese near-slave-laborers who are paid one dollar a day. The gifts you buy are marked up in price in a store three-thousand percent over what it cost the Chinaman to make them.
Then we tell our children the presents were not made by a Chinaman and sold to us by a retailor for a large amount of money. We tell our children the gifts were brought by a fat man in a red suit who squeezed down our chimney and left the presents around a pine tree that we purchased (at also a high price), the tree set in the living room and decorated with small round glass and plastic balls.
In other words, we tell a lie to our children….until they become old enough to learn the truth for themselves.
It all makes sense to me. Does it to you?
The idea of the fat man in the red suit started in Germany. So Santa Claus must be a German. What does this have to do with Jesus?
It was the British who made Christmas what it is today starting as recently as the 1880’s.
Before that….
Hundreds of years ago and for centuries, people in Europe of the Christian faith celebrated Christmas only perhaps by burning a log (Yule log) in the fireplace, and the adults drinking whiskey and getting high.
Then, because the Three Wise Men gave the baby Jesus gifts (perfume called myrrh, people back in those days didn’t take showers, and they stunk).
Because of the Three Wise Men, the British upper-class (rich people not the poor), decided it would be nice to give their own child a gift….copying the baby Jesus.
If it’s good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for my kid.
But a present of some sort was only given to the child, at first, back then, not to the adults. Then, after that in the 1900’s, presents had to be given to everybody. It must have been a Liberal Socialist who thought this up, a giveaway program. Now everybody had to have a gift, even Uncle Fred and Aunt Flo.
Christmas had evolved from a simple observance of a birth into a gifting holiday costing hundreds of dollars…a commercialized venture that our national economy now depends on each year.
But we still have a fat German man with a white beard dressed in a red suit who climbs back up your chimney and yells “Ho Ho Ho!” Then he departs in a sleigh pulled by reindeer.
….This is perfectly logical. Isn’t it?
Many of us spend money that we don’t have on credit and hope to pay it off in the months following Christmas.
Our buying has done two things. It helped to propel China into an economic power-house whose government can now threaten us militarily. And secondly, the factories that make the presents carbon pollute the atmosphere and cause global warming… that is melting the Polar Ice Cap----the North Pole---the fictional home of the German fat man Santa Claus.
Christmas cards like those produced by the company Currier & Ives, they often portray idyllic winter Christmas snow scenes. For example, a little cabin with adorable animals a rabbit, fox, raccoon and deer in the yard, with smoke coming from a fireplace chimney. A scene of paradise…
Real Christmas is often much different….
The pandemonium of a crowded airport, jammed freeways….
I’m gonna go through with it…Christmas. I get in my car. The shopping mall, there’s no parking. You can stay home and order gifts on the internet, but because you waited too long, they often aren’t delivered until after Christmas.
It’s a proven fact that personal stress goes up at Christmastime…. for many reasons….melancholia, reflection about the time of year’s end, heavy traffic, gained weight from eating cakes and drinking liquor…being low on money…whatever).
I finally find a place to park after another competing driver flips me the bird (makes an obscene middle index finger).
I get out of my car.
A guy and his wife are arguing in the parking lot. He hauls off and slaps her. She starts to sob and runs away.
I yell at the guy, “You’re not Currier & Ives!”
I go into the store and buy a small inconsequential gift that is nevertheless really expensive. I use a credit card because I don’t have the money.
Okay…I’ll get though it; and then again next year.
Ho Ho Ho! Happy Holidays!
John Sammon is an author, actor (General Hospital, It Lives Again, Deathsport) and film narrator (Smithsonian Award winner….American Indian Baskets). He is a member of no political party.
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