For all of these reasons I refuse to listen to Christmas music before Thanksgiving Day. In fact, this makes it a special, exciting moment – making the meal even more profound – as we are able to hear Christmas carols for the first time and really feel like that is the start of the season

My husband thought I was a little too enraged at the fact that they took down Halloween decorations on the 29th of October and replaced them with Christmas decorations.

After next Thursday – bring on the season – but before then – LET ME ENJOY THANKSGIVING!!!! And for that matter – my favorite holiday, Halloween. Don’t ruin my Halloween with Christmas trees!

Keep an eye out for December 23rd when they start rolling out the Valentine’s Day chocolates!

AND, for the record, my family celebrates Christmas, too. I like the holiday. It means delicious food, copious amounts of wine, and presents both given and received. Who couldn’t get on board with that?

I just don’t need it to last longer than a week.

@ Carl: Seriously, though. “Where’s the love?” Isn’t that what holidays are meant to be about, anyway? Special days set aside for reflection, reminding us of those reasons to actually appreciate humanity, for? All the other days of the year, we focus on how we’re destroying something, hoarding or overconsuming something else, killing someone or fighting. What’s a handful of days intended to celebrate goodness? All of this publically self-rightous nitpicking, on the part of AFA, just cheapens the holidays. One of my most sentimental Christmas ornaments is one that was made with paste, pipe-cleaners and felt, by my little brother when he was in elementary school. Every bulb in a “Crate & Barrel” catalogue couldn’t replace it and I’m not bent on punishing them for not producing items that could. In my eyes, they could never win that contest, even if they tried.

You’re right: The supporters of this boycott appear to be looking to preserve some lost ideal, some sentimental memory of Christmas that they see slipping away before their eyes. But the fix they want won’t be found in department stores and malls. It’s about doing, not buying; celebrating in an almost non-commercial way, socializing in a way that isn’t tied to mass consumption. Making the buying of things, only a small part of a holiday.

And, seriously, the AFA guys are…a little on the intense side, to say the least. (And, generally, not representative of all Christians.)

@Carl: I disagree–and this will seem like maybe a semantic distinction, but I think it’s important–that the intrinsic value of the event is necessarily concomitant with the intrinsic value of the holiday. That is, if you believe in the event, and that it has intrinsic value, fine okay. And therefore the remembrance of that event does, indeed, have intrinsic value. However, the holiday is not the remembrance of the event. The remembrance of the event is an act that you, as an individual, undertake, and it exists independent of your circumstances. At best, the holiday is a gentle social pressure to remember the event. At worst, I suppose, it’s actually a kind of crutch in terms of your spiritual development.

But, ultimately, the holiday itself only has relative value. The event changed the moral order of the universe; the remembrance of the event influences the moral character of the individual. The holiday is just a day that we’ve marked on our calendars to remind us to actually engage in that remembrance. It’s value exists only relative to how badly you need that reminder–if you’ve been remembering Christ every day of the week, or if you’ve personally decided that you’ll remember Christ on the third Tuesday of every March, then the mark on the calendar has no value at all.

Christmas itself is not intrinsically valuable; it’s just an arbitrary arrangement of labels. So, I guess I agree in principal, just disagree that there is any practical reason for this to be relevant to any human being at all. So, Christmas is your day, so what? It could just as easily be 4:20 every Wednesday. If you were really serious about loving Jesus, you’d be learning how to pray with every heartbeat, anyway, like in The Cloud of Unknowing.