Have had two very different pre-Christmas experiences. One was a Christmas episode of a Nickelodeon cartoon series called The Fairly OddParents, which I saw on JetBlue. The other is a German anthology of Christmas-related prose which my sister got when in college, and she and I just rediscovered 
Skype-sifting through a box of her things I've shlepped around for more than a decade.
The former, called "Christmas Everyday," tells of a boy whose wish for perpetual Christmas comes true. Everyone is showered with presents continually, but not everyone is happy. In particular, the other holidays - a thuggish New Year, a dorky April Fool, and a mafioso Easter Bunny - are furious, and head off for the North Pole to kill Santa, an aging Baby Boomer with sunglasses who only goes chubby and ho-ho-ho when all the magic of the world is directed his way. The boy learns of their nefarious plan, and saves the day, with the help of children from around the world he's contacted by internet (I kid you not), and everyone learns that it's not all about getting presents all the time, but being nice to people, bla bla bla: everyone should be
Santa. If there's any shred of a trace of a residue of a memory of a religious origin to Christmas, I missed it.
Very different the experience of Weihnachten: Prosa aus der Weltliteratur, which seems to be a mix of stories of sadder wiser grown-ups remembering the presumably irretrievable magic of childhood (Heinrich Böll tells of someone waiting alone for a train on Christmas Eve, the station vacant but for a nativity scene in a shop window), and retellings of the Christmas story among paupers and poor families excluded from smug Christmas cheer; One, by Dostoyevsky, tells of a destitute orphan greeted by Jesus as he freezes to death and joins a flock of other abandoned dead children. In this company, Hans Christian Anderson's subaltern Christmas tree fits right in. This literature is Christ-haunted.
Soooo... which culture is more secularized? Which is more Christian?
Skype-sifting through a box of her things I've shlepped around for more than a decade.The former, called "Christmas Everyday," tells of a boy whose wish for perpetual Christmas comes true. Everyone is showered with presents continually, but not everyone is happy. In particular, the other holidays - a thuggish New Year, a dorky April Fool, and a mafioso Easter Bunny - are furious, and head off for the North Pole to kill Santa, an aging Baby Boomer with sunglasses who only goes chubby and ho-ho-ho when all the magic of the world is directed his way. The boy learns of their nefarious plan, and saves the day, with the help of children from around the world he's contacted by internet (I kid you not), and everyone learns that it's not all about getting presents all the time, but being nice to people, bla bla bla: everyone should be
Santa. If there's any shred of a trace of a residue of a memory of a religious origin to Christmas, I missed it.Very different the experience of Weihnachten: Prosa aus der Weltliteratur, which seems to be a mix of stories of sadder wiser grown-ups remembering the presumably irretrievable magic of childhood (Heinrich Böll tells of someone waiting alone for a train on Christmas Eve, the station vacant but for a nativity scene in a shop window), and retellings of the Christmas story among paupers and poor families excluded from smug Christmas cheer; One, by Dostoyevsky, tells of a destitute orphan greeted by Jesus as he freezes to death and joins a flock of other abandoned dead children. In this company, Hans Christian Anderson's subaltern Christmas tree fits right in. This literature is Christ-haunted.
Soooo... which culture is more secularized? Which is more Christian?
