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Originally Posted by nekokami
I'm with you there.
You should have seen me trying to explain Christmas to our Chinese kids. Their first impression was about the presents, naturally, but once we had enough language in common, I felt that they really should have a sense of what this holiday is supposed to be about. (And much as I like the Charlie Brown special, I think kids usually glaze over when Linus does his quotation bit.)
So I read and explained the relevant bits of Luke, but the version they really like is a retelling about the innkeeper who keeps getting waked up in the middle of the night by this couple who arrive late, need a place to stay, need blankets, need another small blanket, have a bunch of people looking for them... and finally, he's roused completely out of any hope of a night's sleep by glaring lights and these angels singing overhead. (That's the bit my kids like, because I sing the first few measures of the Hallelujah Chorus at that point.)
I don't ask that my kids believe any part of this story (though I think the historical record does offer evidence of the existence of the central figure as a real person). I just think they ought to know what the holiday is supposed to be about. (We've also discussed how there have been and still are other holidays at that time of year in many other cultures as well.) My younger daughter was culturally a Buddhist when she came to live with us, though she didn't have much of a sense of what that meant (she was about 6 years old). She's still working through her beliefs, with a tendency toward universalism. My older daughter was raised as a communist atheist until she came to live with us at age 11, and while she's occasionally expressed some interest in religion (more as a "belonging" kind of thing), currently she's back to being pretty anti-religious. So asking them to believe the Christmas story is probably asking too much, but I still think they should know the basics of the story and respect others who do hold those beliefs, and I do ask them to consider this a time of year of thinking of others, and that seems to be working reasonably well.
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That sounds like a good approach. As a Buddhist, I don't happen to believe in a creator deity, and therefore ... in my view .... Jesus of Nazareth could not have been a "son" of such a deity.
However, I do firmly believe that the man himself (1) existed and (2) was a wonderful human being and teacher. Most of everything that he said (that was documented that he said), I think were wonderful ideas, and many of them can be incorporated into a Buddhist belief system.
As such, I certainly have no problem with Christians celebrating the birth of the person they consider to be their "savior." No problem at all ... never had a problem with it ... never will. (I just had to put a stop to my mother dragging me to Christmas services with her, because it just seemed like the highest form of hypocrisy.)
But the crass commercialism ... the endless mention of the number of shopping days left ... and the hype that occurs earlier and earlier every year. It honestly makes me want to puke. I mean .... why don't they just go back to a simple celebration in church (where it belongs) and then create "National Greed Month" ... and channel all the commercialism into that??