This day is the day of Christ. Christmas. More of Christ. Jesus is the reason for the season. And it is also a full moon and a few days after that winter sun solstice where the days get longer or shorter or someting. And here I find myself blah blogging away. And I received another one of those emails a few days ago from a friend who sent it to their list of friends. And the email is about Jesus Christ, or is it about shopping and the economy? I gather this time of the year would be an appropriate time to repost it, as it is Christmas and the birth of Jesus Christ according to the Gregorian calendar, or some calendar. And if you happen to be in the New York City area, Trash Worship Recycle And Pray will be having a save the Christmas trees that get thrown out of their homes the day after Christmas, or even the day of Christmas funeral procession and ceremony or something. Happy Holy Days.
to all yanbukis of good will
wednsday december 26th marks the beginning of the waste redemption
season...
in honor of it we will hold a ceremony at St. Marks Church outside in
the triangle park
starting at about 1 PM to about 2 PM....
you are welcome to attend and join the tinseling with your precious rescued gift wrap trash
the three trash trees will be planted in the waste cans in wait for decent and proper burial by sanitation...
light and joy
waste zeroseven
and here is that other email I received.....
Christ And The Holiday Christmas
If your purpose or intent is to honor the person or teachings of Jesus
Christ, here are a few examples of how you can really celebrate Christmas.
1- Forgive someone you have a longstanding grudge or problem with.
2- Become a friend to someone who has few friends.
3- Visit a shut-in or shut-out. Someone alone, in the hospital, in
prison, a street person, on the margins.
4- Meet an unmet need of someone privately or anonymously.
5- Feed someone who is hungry.
6- Clothe someone who is needy.
7- Extend grace to someone who has wronged you.
8- Be a peacemaker between people in strife.
9- Love someone who is hard to love.
10- Try to not be judgmental.
[comments follow from various people...]
Grace, Mercy and Peace. Seek these 3 earnestly and the rest will follow.
The best part is that it cannot be bought at any price.
The worst thing about Christmas is that the very same people who favor
warmongering, slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent people,
torture and our status as the world's largest arms producer and purveyor
of violence will go to church and sing about how they love the Prince of
Peace, the swarthy little Middle Eastern baby Jesus...
I agree that Xmas is too commercial & starts way too early (my main
gripe about it), but I'm mystified by all the articles on AlterNet that
advocate not buying anything, ever. I work in retail. Are you folks
trying to drive me out of a job?
It seems exactly as if you want to shut down the retail sector entirely
in the season where it makes 40% of sales, drive millions of people out
of work, and cause another Great Depression.
Burn me at the stake for uttering heresy, but the real issue in
Christmas is in fact, retail.
A retail industry person above pointed out that if everybody quit buying
stuff, the retail industry would suffer and by extension, the rest of
the economy.
This is true, but that is also the crux of a dilemma. The consumer
economy as we know it was really ramped up after WWII as a means of
keeping the level of economic activity from the war years going, but
transitioning to a manufacturing and retail mode. Advertising really
kicked into high gear because there was a need to turn thrifty, penny
pinching Americans into big spenders.
Now, as we look at the big picture, we see that all this focus on
consumer economics has created a dependency that in the long run is
unsustainable. America, a very small percentage of the world population
consumes an very outsize portion of all the resources in the world. We
are entering an era, for instance, in which gasoline prices will
continue to rise because the overall resource supply versus demand will
be less and less in the consumer's favor.
I recently went through a long and exhausting process of working through
a house full of Christmas gifts from as far back as the 1930s and trying
to figure out how to sell of give it away. That is the ultimate end of
the rush to buy stuff for Christmas.
You have to ask, if you have any interest in where all this is going,
what happens if an economy based on making, transporting, selling,
storing, and reselling stuff can no longer be relied on? Then what?
I think that, to point out that our economic bag of tricks only has one
trick - to sell stuff - is correct and that people buying less stuff
will impair the retail goose laying our golden eggs. However, I think it
is short sighted to stop there. We need to develop more tricks in our
economic bag of tricks and to find other ways of generating jobs and
wealth aside from choking the world with more and more stuff, and
depleting resources to do it. Really, we have to if we are going to
survive in the long term.
These are all good comments, especially the one about the false idea
that giving is mostly a Christian concept. What was the author thinking
on that one? Giving is part of all religions and nonbelievers as well.
Material consumption has nothing to do with God. People give to make
people happy or out of guilt of reciprocity or even to get sex. We have
been lied to by corporations in this country and bought it hook, line
and sinker. We have lost everything that makes us human except our very
bodies. The average Americans has less than three close friends. That
tells a whole story on its own.
We are headed into a depression of historic proportions that will make
the Great Depression look like a bad day at the beach. It wasn't caused
by people not purchasing. It was caused by the illegal private company
The Federal Reserve printing money out of thin air and causing inflation
with nothing to back our currency since the gold standard ended.
People keep asking if it's possible to break this cycle. Yes it's
possible but it is not likely. Americans are besieged with consumerism
and corporations will not do the moral thing. They are cold-blooded
profit-making machines. That is abhorrent to the natural state of man
except for the few authoritarians that run the world. People in this country don't
read anymore and when they do it's usually lies and propaganda. They
never consider the biases of their sources. All news is controlled by
five media companies and soon to be even less.
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