Mark's Notebook


	Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. - Isaiah 1:18

Praise for a secular Santa who delivers the goods

The Australian

Thursday 23 December 2004, 12:44 pm
Keywords: Christian Topics , News Articles

By Irshad Manji

When I was growing up in Canada, Ho-Ho-Ho was a No-No-No - not because my parents deemed it so, but because I did. My defiance sprang from the Mennonite kid who incurred my second-grade teacher's wrath by refusing to make Christmas ornaments with the rest of our class. The moment she condemned him to stand in the hall, I felt my own rumblings of resistance.

A week later, I challenged my family's decision to put up a Christmas tree. The twinkle and tingle of tinsel made my sisters positively giddy. They laughed and decorated. I frowned and demonstrated. "We're supposed to be Muslims!" I protested to my mother. "Santa is for everybody," she calmly assured me.

I'd like to believe it's maturity that turned me around. Truth is, though, it's strategy as much as maturity: as a Muslim, I can claim religious immunity to the routine demands of Christmas while taking advantage of the occasion's small pleasures. I don't feel culturally compelled to buy expensive gifts -- or even cheap ones -- for people who get on my nerves most of the year.

Yet I appreciate that many of my friends choose to. Indulging in the rituals of Christmas, however exhausting, infuriating and impoverishing by turns, makes serious souls unusually human again. I love watching folks get excited the way they don't on any other holiday.

Relaxed conversation in front of a crackling fire -- we'd never squeeze that combination out of each other were it not for Christmas Day, when every monument to profit-making has resolutely shut down.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,11762488%255E7583,
00.html