Or you can be like my husband and ba humbug all December holidays.

I love the axial tilt images and don’t think I could beat their cleverness, but I do think that any image evoking the beauty of life would work equally well. I like the axial tilt images more the more I think about them though, because the earth itself is kind of the largest thing you can draw that represents life (I mean, all the life we know exists is on it!) and the joke incorporates scientific knowledge, which has helped humanity in so many ways.

However, I would like to point something out. Yes, Christmas is a Christian holiday in general, and I think that it’s important to keep all religious holidays out of the realm of the public sphere (i.e. schools, malls, the like…). But, that does not mean that we shouldn’t celebrate the holiday as a cultural one with our families and friends. I’m not a Christian, but I celebrate it in a cultural sense. In that way, I don’t fully agree that those of us who are non-religious should bother with coming up with ways to celebrate the ‘winter holiday’. Maybe it has to do with early experiences…, in my childhood, the most religious my family got was setting up a scene of Jesus’ birth in the manger during Christmas (and we didn’t talk about the Bible or anything like that). It was strictly cultural, and isn’t that what Christmas is all about? Now a days anyway.

(By this, I mean that omni-holiday where you wander around in a daze throughout December and say “Happy Holidays!” to people, and possibly exchange gifts.)

I really like Generic Winter Holiday in terms of some of its festivities. Why? Lights are pretty. Pine trees smell nice… but it has some drawbacks, like hearing White Christmas for the nine millionth time triggering a murderous rampage.

Anyway, I’m loving this back-to-our-roots atmosphere that is brewing in our culture today. Green ideas are ripening into fierce autumnal hues with all the vibrancy of signal flares. African motifs are etching themselves into the zeitgeist from every direction as the cradle of civilization finally takes its first steps out of the stone age…

Maybe I’m too optimistic for my own good, but I think something is stirring in the deep recesses of the global subconscious that screams for humanity to become a positive force, and I think celebratory life stances like Humanism would form the backbone of a much better world than most of us would admit to imagining today.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/keithproctor/2286302663/

However, this one (which I found just now while looking for the URL for that one) isn’t bad either:

http://subwayfox.net/index.php?q=node/330

~David D.G.

“Times are tough, times are hard.
Here’s your fuckin’ Christmas card.”