RE: Xmas trees in Cohousing
From: Jean Pfleiderer (pfleiderer_jWIZARD.COLORADO.EDU)
Date: Tue, 14 Feb 95 13:00 CST
Rebecca,

I'm sympathetic to many of your points, but I think it is important that we
all speak respectfully to each other, and that includes reading carefully
and not misrepresenting what someone has said, in my opinion.  You say:

>Arne feels that those who are offended by government-sanctioned
>celebration of Christmas need to "lighten up".

This is not what Arne said.  It takes a stretch even to read that into what
Arne said.  He does not take a position about having the government
"sanction" celebration of Christmas, if by that you have in mind the sort of
thing that we here in Colorado have argued about for years, the fact that
the City and County Building in Denver has a creche among its otherwise
"secular" (though in my opinion equally offensive) "holiday decorations".
He complains, with some justification I believe, that we are to refer to
what everyone knows are the Christmas holidays as "the winter holidays", but
I think most of his other discussion is centered on how cohousing groups and
other non-governmental entities treat the situation.  You make him sound as
though he supports having the government sponsor Christmas celebrations, and
I don't think he said anything of the kind.

  This sounds like
>a convenient call for the perpetuation of the status quo, so
>that the "oppressed" majority won't have to be bothered to 
>think about anyone else. 

Arne also did not say that he didn't want to be bothered to think about
anyone else, or that people whose spiritual practices happen to be in the
majority should not have to be bothered to think about anyone else.  Indeed,
I can not think of anything Arne said that even "sounds like" a "call for
the perpetuation of the status quo"  (it sounded to me like Arne doesn't
much care for the status quo, which he perceives to be oppressive towards
the majority culture), let alone anything that "sounds like" he doesn't want
to be bothered thinking about anyone else.  So, why do you say this?  Are
you trying to create division where there is none?

>The example of the schools which do not allow the "c-word"
>is not quite true. It is not that people are not allowed
>to *say* the word Christmas, it is that they are not allowed
>to refer to winter break as "christmas holidays"

Arne did not say that people are not allowed to *say* the word Christmas.
Here is what Arne said:

>In Seattle Public schools, you can't officially write "Christmas". 
>You have to use "winter holidays, the holidays", or some such strained
>circumlocution to avoid using the C-word. But Kwanza, a relatively obscure
>tradition indigenous to some African tribes, is offically promoted. 
>Meanwhile, the full withering blast of Commercialmas is going on out
>there. 

Now I realize we could quibble with what he might have meant by "officially
write"  (I think he meant exactly what you are talking about, that you can't
refer to the holidays as the "Christmas holidays", but I suppose you could
interpet that otherwise).  But no matter how you parse it, "officially
write" does not mean "say".

 Actually,
>I agree with Arne, they should call the break Christmas, 
>because it *is*, and that is my whole point.

And right here, it seems to me, you are in effect acknowledging that you did
understand what Arne meant, and that it was not that one can not "say" the
word Christmas.  So, what's your point?  What is it you want to take Arne to
task for?

 Public
>schools, and almost all employers, give people Christmas off.
>NOT hanukah, NOT kawanza, NOT ramadan, NOT yom kippur, but
>Christmas is the holiday for which everyone is given a vacation.

Precisely.  

>The fact that the school might hold an in-school menhorah
>or kawanza-log lighting doesn't even come close to 
>equalling the systematic preference given to christia 
>students in the form of having their holiday off 
>from school. (Though i would be perfectly willlijng 
>to agree that  a public school shouldn't be
>celebrating other holidays either, and besides, 
>they are probably doing it wrong. How would one
>hold a yom kippur service in schoo anyway?)

Actually, where I went to school (a public school in New Jersey) Jews
regularly took off on Yom Kippur, and it was understood that they were
entitled to make-up tests, time to complete assignments, and so forth; this
was similarly the policy in colleges and universities I attended.  It is
true that the rest of the community did not take those days off, but I do
think you need to make some allowance for sheer numbers here.  Fact is, in
any given class that might mean two or three people were missing; it did not
make it difficult to continue on with class, and to not have class would
have meant to give a lot of people a holiday to no purpose whatever, since
they would not have been observing Yom Kippur.  Not having Christmas as a
holiday, however, would mean that most schools, indeed, most everything,
would be able to go forward marginally at best.  It is hard enough to keep
skeleton staffs in essential services, like hospitals, on that day of the
year (and a very kind gesture on the part of the Jewish community in many
places that Jews will volunteer to work on that day precisely because they
are not going to celebrate it anyway).  It would really be kind of stupid to
deliberately make Christmas not a publicly recognized holiday; it would be
to fail to recognize that most people will take it off one way or another
anyway.

A winter holiday of some sort is a prominant feature of most religions
(even, interestingly enough, of several that originated in places where
there effectively is no winter) and probably is a good idea psychologically
as well as spiritually; unless we are prepared to do without one altogether
for a while it is going to be very difficult indeed to dissociate such a
holiday from Christmas in any western culture.  I do not say this is a good
or a bad thing, just that it is a true thing.  

>
>The reason schools don't refer to the break as "christmas"
>does not help students of minority religions, it only
>allows christians to avoid the guilt over having
>their holiday officially sanctioned. I suspect that the
>schools think that by demanding that people refer to 
>it as Winter Break, then no one will notice 
>that it mysteriously always happens to coincide
>with christmas. 

Of course, there is not even a remote possibility that this unfortunate
situation is the result of sincere, caring people, some of whom, perhaps all
of whom, come from a Christian tradition.  It is not possible that they felt
not guilt, but rather that simple justice demanded they do what they could
to obviate some of the worst excesses of their culture.  No, calling it
"Winter Holidays" was of course a plot by really devious Christians to get
the heat off them.  We don't have a little paranoia going here, do we?

>
>Arne feels that he shouldn't have to give up the celebrations
>of "his culture" so that others won't feel bad, especially
>since celebrations of minority cultures are being
>encuraged.

And I agree with him.  Do you disagree with him?  Do you think he SHOULD
have to give up the celebrations of his culture, so that others won't feel bad?

>Thanks for saying this. This sounds like
>an acknowledgment that Christmas is a cleebration
>from *your* culture, not some universal celebration.

Well, of course it is.  Yes, there are people who are so uneducated or
insensitive or something that they really think Jesus spoke the red-letter
words in the King James version of the Christian Bible in English.  Such
people probably do not really understand that Christianity is not the only
religion on earth.  But Arne does not appear to me to be one of these
people.  I rather doubt you will find many of them in any cohousing group
anywhere. So why the lecture, at this time, to this list?

>After all, if it were merely a culturally-neutral 
>homage to capitalism, then whywould anyone here
>want so badly to celebrate it publicly i n
>their cohousing group?

I haven't seen any sign in any of the posts on this issue that anyone wants
badly, or necessarily even wants at all, to "celebrate it publicly in their
cohousing group".  Where do you see that?

>
>I think a lot of this comes down to a question of how
>decisions should be made in cohousing with regard to 
>minority interests. Do we simply use majority-rule?
>Do we say that every groups traditions are
>equally wqelcome? What if i want to celebrate a
>wiccan tradition that involves a nude physical
>ritual of saturnalia? Would this be welcome 
>in the common house?

Maybe.  You seem to me to confuse the issue of whether something can be done
in the common house after discussion and group agreement with whether it
would be okay to do it on the spur of the moment without warning (including
by default anyone who happened to be there).  Many things could be done in
the first case that wouldn't work very well in the second.  And you seem to
me to confuse the issue of whether a particular tradition is being
celebrated with whether there are elements of that celebration which, even
if separated from the tradition, might be offensive.  In other words, as was
remarked by another poster, nailing the Christmas tree to the floor might
not be acceptable (i.e., not because it is a Christmas tree, but because it
is nailed to the floor), smoking a sacred pipe in the common house might not
be acceptable (not because it is a sacred pipe, but because it is a pipe);
similarly, nudity might not be acceptable, not because it was part of Wiccan
tradition but because it was nudity.  Some might object to Christmas trees,
not because they represent the "Christian" but because they mean the killing
of a live tree only to toss it out a few weeks later.

It seems to me that we decide these kinds of issues the way we decide
anything else, we discuss them among ourselves and we come to something like
consensus about them.

>
>This question of cultural dominance is not
>merely theoretical. I and many others have 
>ancestors who were beaten or killed for 
>refusing to celebrate christmas. Ignoring 
>power differentials, and asserting that Christianity
>is being suppressed, while it still retains so 
>much social support, is dishonest and will
>not help create more genuinely 
>multiculturally-supportive communities.

Ignoring reality, and pretending that victims, once empowered, will never
turn around and victimize their former oppressors, is also dishonest and
will not help create more genuinely multiculturally-supportive communities.
If your neighbors are not willing to forego a Christmas tree in the common
house on the grounds that you find it offensive, then I agree with you that
there is something wrong with your neighbors.  But I think you have a
responsibility, too, to make it known to them that you find it offensive,
and why, and to listen in turn to how they feel about that. I would also ask
you to consider whether you can not instead ask for support in doing
whatever you like around your traditions, in the common house, so that you
can be satisfied that your traditions are also honored and respected, at
which point, it seems to me, you might be able to honor and respect someone
else's, even if that happens to be a "majority" tradition, even if in the
past exponents of that tradition did horrible things to exponents of your
tradition.  I don't know how else we put those things behind us except by
starting to put them behind us.  It will not help to "create more genuinely
multiculturally-supportive communities" to say we will support all cultures
EXCEPT the one from which most of us come.


>
>I am willing to defend the right of anyone, christians 
>included, to celebrate their traditions.

Me too.  I suspect Arne is, too.

>It is easier
>to do so when the people demanding their rights 
>are willing to acknowlegde that it *is* their traditions
>that they are trying to defend.

When and where on this list, or, indeed, in cohousing, have you heard anyone
saying anything else?

  If christmas
>were a culturally-neutral universal, we would not
>even be having this discussion, because
>theyre would be no one around to disagree.

That's true.  Who said otherwise?  Who is it you are fighting with, Rebecca?
It's not, I think, Arne, or anyone else who has spoken about it on this thread.

Jean
Jean Pfleiderer
Publications Specialist III
University Management Systems
University of Colorado

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