Happy-whatever for you, I hope?

Today is a holiday of sorts, I guess, though in my case it doesn’t have much meaning. I don’t regard myself as a christian: early in my life I learnt first-hand the utter hypocrisy of the church – and organised religion in general – so whilst I have a deep respect for the aims of the christian faith, I also hold a deep loathing for most of its outward forms. Neither do I see any value in atheism: its purported ‘rationality’ is just another hollow, lethal religion, with a crazed priesthood – such as the self-obsessed ‘Darwin’s Rottweiler’, Richard Dawkins – that shows few, if any improvements on the worst inanities of the Inquisition. And as for the real religion of the west, the Church of Conspicuous Consumption… well, the idea that exhorting people to acquire pointless goods that they neither need nor want seems a very strange interpretation of the term ‘economy’…

No doubt it has some meaning for families: having no family of my own, that side of it tends to pass me by. (Is it only about teaching children the economic imperative of obsessive acquisition, perhaps? I must admit it’s hard for me to not feel somewhat cynical about the whole absurd affair, though I do see the light of genuine joy in some children’s eyes.) Of polite necessity, rather than actual choice, I go through the necessary rituals of nominal family, visiting siblings with whom I have little in common other than accident of birth; I’ve sent out the socially-mandatory ‘Christmas cards’ to a few of my closer relatives; but that’s about all that I can remember to do in that regard. Oh well.

To me, the real ‘holiday’ is any day that we make holy, a literal ‘holy-day’: beyond that, today is just another day for me, really. And my real family, I suppose, is scattered round the globe, probably none of them much closer than a hundred miles from here: colleagues, friends, people with whom I can share some of the strange ideas and expressions that so often come crashing through my soul. Yet it sometimes seems I’ve long since lost the habit of connecting: almost reached the point where I no longer know how. Oh well. If that’s you, my apologies: however distant I may seem from you, you are much respected, even if that is perhaps the most I can say. 🙂

Whichever way you take it, and whatever it may mean to you, enjoy the day: Happy Whatever!