{"id":113843,"date":"2025-12-01T14:52:39","date_gmt":"2025-12-01T21:52:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=113843"},"modified":"2025-12-02T00:39:47","modified_gmt":"2025-12-02T07:39:47","slug":"its-the-christmas-season","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2025\/12\/its-the-christmas-season.html","title":{"rendered":"It’s the Christmas season!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>
Queen\u2019s College, Oxford \u00a0(Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph). \u00a0It seems that not every consumer of newspapers in England refined his or her powers of critical discernment at the universities of Oxford or Cambridge.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Daily Mail<\/em> \u2014 a daily British middle-market tabloid \u2014 has often been criticized for unreliability, sensationalism, and inaccuracy. \u00a0In February 2017, the English Wikipedia actually banned its use as a source. \u00a0Happily, though, The Daily Mail<\/em> has made a regular hobby of publishing sensationalistic articles about marginal or former Latter-day Saints \u2014 just Google \u201cDaily Mail Mormon\u201d to see what I mean \u2014 and this one is pretty much par for the course: \u00a0\u201cThe REAL lives of Mormon wives: Why a fundamentalist \u2018prophet\u2019 at the head of the world\u2019s biggest polygamous sect is being sued by his ex-wife in a Utah court\u201d<\/a>\u00a0 The author nods halfheartedly in the direction but, on the whole, makes no really serious effort to distinguish the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints<\/a> from polygamist schismatics or, for that matter, from representative examples of Latter-day Saint womanhood such as those featured on The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives<\/em>. \u00a0(He cites the dynamics of what seems to be an unusually terrible family in the Apostolic United Brethren sect, or AUB, as exemplifying \u201cthe oppressively patriarchal world of strict Mormonism,\u201d while describing \u201cMormonism\u201d as \u201ca religion traditionally dismissed as staid, boring and bizarre.\u201d \u00a0(\u201cMore practically, the AUB also differs from other Mormon sects in believing that sexual intercourse can be a source of pleasure, not an act solely designed for purpose of procreation.\u201d) \u00a0We just can\u2019t win: At one and the same time, we\u2019re \u00a0staid, prudish, and boring, and yet \u2014 being also oppressively patriarchal and bizarre \u2014 we\u2019re so irresistibly fascinating that The Daily Mail<\/em> simply can\u2019t stop publishing lurid articles about us.<\/p>\n

\"Christ<\/a>
Tom Quad, Christ Church, Oxford. (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We\u2019ve entered the month of December, and, with Thanksgiving behind us, I\u2019m now willing to acknowledge that we\u2019re into the Christmas season. \u00a0(See this notable bit of holiday cheer<\/a> from Chicago!)<\/p>\n

At some point between now and Christmas Day, I hope that you will take the opportunity to watch the eighteen-minute film The Christ Child: A Nativity Story<\/em><\/a>, which I regard as one of the best movies ever made by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. \u00a0It has the characters speaking the real languages of the story. \u00a0It sets the story properly in a first-century Judaea that actually looks<\/em> like first-century Judaea. \u00a0The ambience is, well, humble<\/em>. \u00a0The manger is, as it almost certainly was, a stone feeding trough for animals (from the French verb manger <\/em>[pronounced roughly mahn-zhay<\/em>], \u201cto eat\u201d) in the style of stony Palestine, rather than a wooden crib in the style of forested Austria or Bavaria or wooded Jacobean England. \u00a0And the emotional reaction of the principal \u201cWise Man\u201d to the Christ child \u2014 who is of the proper age: no longer an infant but a toddler \u2014 never fails to move me.<\/p>\n

This is the first of my Christmas-related media recommendations for 2025. \u00a0It won\u2019t be the last, however, although by far most of them will be concerned with music.<\/p>\n

\"Jennie<\/a>
\u201cThanksgiving at Plymouth,\u201d by Jennie Augusta Brownscombe (1925)
Wikimedia Commons public domain image<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

America\u2019s formal Thanksgiving Day holiday is in our rearview mirror and is rapidly receding into the distance, but the holiday season is still with us, and the holidays are a wonderful time altogether for expressing gratitude and giving thanks. \u00a0So I think it appropriate, even now in December, to share a column that I wrote for Meridian Magazine<\/em> at Thanksgiving 2021 but didn\u2019t include in my two Thanksgiving-related blog entries here last week, \u201cA Really, Really Long Post For The Eve Of Thanksgiving\u201d<\/a> and \u201cFour More for Thanksgiving.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0 It\u2019s entitled \u201cGiving Thanks and Giving Thought.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Christmas<\/a>
The Accra Ghana Temple in December 2006
(Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But, alas, it\u2019s time for a look at the Christopher Hitchens Memorial \u201cHow Religion Poisons Everything\u201d File<\/em>\u2122, which preserves a record of the horrors and depredations visited upon the world by ravening theists and the vicious absurdities of theism:<\/p>\n