24.12.07
Christmas moaning
Oh it’s that time of year again. This is when all those religious type stick their noses into our celebrations and start insisting that there be some religious aspect to Christmas. Of all the cheek!
But as regular as clockwork out come the untruths and rehashed “facts” that these folk tend to bring out to argue their case.
Some bishop or other who ought to know better (either that or he’s being cynically manipulative – surely not) brought out the old “Christians are under attack at Christmas” stuff and used, I can hardly believe it, the old “They called the holiday ‘Winterval’ in Birmingham the other year” argument.
I covered this either last year or the year before.
This is an utterly misrepresented story.
Birmingham City Council had a period of 6 weeks over December which encompassed Christmas as well as various other celebrations from other communities and they DID call it Winterval. The whole thing, of 6 weeks. Within that they did have Christmas and called it such; just as they had a muslim celebration and a Jewish one that they called whatever their names were. They celebrated all of them at the correct time and marketed the whole thing as “Winterval” to draw all the communities together, in theory at least.
Will people stop reporting this example as the death of christianity at Christmas? That happened years ago through too much marketing and too little christianity from the populace as a whole.
“Winterval” was NOT a synonym for Christmas in Birmingham but a laudable attempt to celebrate with many groups who live there. Hardly a bad thing now was it?
Have fun.