Get-Mas Revisited

Almost a year ago I wrote about my frustration over the Christian worry that we are going to lose the "true" meaning of Christmas. It grates on my ears every time I hear Christians try to defend their pagan holiday as "Jesus' Birthday" and how it is sacred. Last year I attempted to flesh this out, and even try to get my family and friends who complained that "Jesus' Birthday" is being damaged by the athiests to actually separate the gift giving from the day so that it is truly made a day to focus on Jesus. Wow! The response I got was telling. "You can't have Christmas without the gifts!" I was told. So I learned that American Christmas is not really about Jesus, but it is about the original pagan practice of gift-giving to which the Roman Catholics added Jesus. This is ironic to me in that the same people who insist that we keep true to the original intent of the American Constitution and the originally understood meaning of biblical.creation stories actually prefer a recent incarnation of a pagan festival. So here I stand again insisting that Christ is not truly a part of American Christmas and that our Christian activists need to be honest or actually make Christmas about Jesus and celebrate gifts another day. New Year's day would be a great pagan holiday to give gifts on.

I am stardust...

One of my favorite ideas is the fact that the molecules that make up our bodies are truly combinations of elements that were originally shed by the stars at the beginning of our universe. As the quote attributed to Allan Sandage goes:

 ”Every one of our chemical elements was once inside a star. The same star. You and I are brothers. We came from the same supernova.”

Just a thought that came to me after watching an astronomer's video on YouTube tonight.