Yes Musick, these outrages make you sometimes long for a real old-fashioned Christmas, like those in the Massachusetts Colonies under the government of the Pilgrim fathers, when you could be put in the stocks for taking off work, or singing a Christmas tune (even to yourself), or indulging in any kind of celebration on Dec. 25.
I often wondered if it was just sheer perversity that made the pilgrims and their English counterparts, the Puritans, try to ban Christmas. Then I read a book by Pierre van Paassen, who told of his youth in Holland in a strict Dutch Reformed milieu. The Dutch Reformed Church, like the early followers of John Knox, orthdox Presbyterians, the Puritans and the Pilgrims, was (and still is) strictly Calvinist.
As van Paassen tells it, the Calvinist doctrine was that Christmas marks the descent of Almighty God into that charnel house of corruption and depravity, the human state, and is therefore nothing to celebrate -- only an occasion to contemplate anew the fathomless and almost hopeless depth of wickedness and sin which is the normal state of humans and the goodness of God in deigning to become human so that at least a few might be rescued. A theology which, although logical from the Biblical premises, is pretty repulsive to most Christians today.
