Solstice Light

[sartorias]

This amazing story of team effort to save lives is cast as a Christmas post, but really, it could as easily have gone up last week during Chanukah, or over the weekend to celebrate the return of the sun, or in acknowledgement of the better nature of human beings, whether couched in terms of spiritual uplift or not

Comments

[kalimac]

what Harry Connolly calls 'Giftmas'

C.S. Lewis divided Christmas into three parts: 1) "a religious festival, important and obligatory for Christians, but of no interest to anyone else"; 2) "a popular holiday ... I much approve of merry-making, but I see no reason why I should volunteer views as to how other people should spend their own money in their own leisure among their own friends"; 3) "the commercial racket ... merely one annual symptom of that lunatic condition in which everyone lives by persuading everyone else to buy things."

He also wrote a hilarious pastiche of Herodotus describing a country (obviously the modern UK) which celebrates two simultaneous holidays, Christmas and "Exmas", the former a quiet religious celebration and the latter a vast lunacy that nobody enjoys but everyone considers obligatory. That the two are actually the same, the writer considers not credible.

There sometimes was a very brief nod to Chanukah

Up here in 1963, this took the form of a primary-school Christmas pageant that included a Hanukkah song introduced with "And here's how other people celebrate Christmas." The school got a few earfuls from my parents about that.

[sartorias]

I have to look up that Lewis pastiche. Sounds like a crackup.

Yeah, there were some pretty wince-making moments at school assemblies during the fifties. And hoo boy, the patriotism hoorah shoveled in amongst the holiday jingles! But that was during and post Joe Mcarthy's snake oil act.

[kalimac]

The Lewis piece is in God in the Dock.

[sartorias]

Clearly I am overdue for a reread.

[whswhs]

I read that particular piece of Lewis's. I thought it was witty.

Have you run across his "Evolutionary Hymn"? I'm quite fond of it-though it adds a bit of irony that I actually agree with a lot of the ideas he's poking fun at.

[kalimac]

Oh yes, I know that poem. It's part of Lewis's attempt to distinguish between science, on the one hand, and the worship of science-derived theology, which he calls scientism, on the other.