Ethan Greenhart wants to rename Christmas as “Turkey Genocide Day”:
Just as there’s nothing civilised about organising society around the wants of Gaia-mauling human beings, and nothing green about traipsing halfway across the planet to trek with donkeys in Peru (how do you know the donkeys want to trek?), so there can never be anything ethical about a holiday whose centrepiece is a dead bird sexually molested by sage; whose star turn is an obese man who drinks that imperialist tipple Coca-Cola and delivers yet more stuff to already stuffed brats; and where taking a tree from a forest, humiliating it with tinsel and sticking it in a living room is seen as a perfectly normal — nay, fun — thing to do.
This is no holiday; it’s a hell-iday for the defenceless creatures and plants of this ball of gas and air we have arrogantly labelled “Earth”. The signs were there 2000 years ago when a knocked-up teenager enslaved a donkey and forced it to carry her hundreds of miles to Bethlehem before ousting cows and sheep so she could give birth in their home.
If that weren’t bad enough, so-called “wise men” (another contradiction in terms) raided nature to find gifts for the resource-user that this young woman unthinkingly gave birth to, including myrrh, which is literally made from the blood that oozes from the wounds of the Commiphora species of trees, and frankincense, which is stolen from the Boswellia tree.
And so it was that this 2000-year-old orgy of animal enslavement, human breeding and gift-giving became an inspiration to the brainless inhabitants of Christendom, who every year ape the Holy Family by abusing animals and dishing out unnecessary gifts and calling the whole stupid shebang a celebration.
Overall, not a bad rant, although it only manages a close second to the Prince Regent’s complaint:
Edmund: So, shall I begin the Christmas story?
Prince: Absolutely! As long as it’s not that terribly depressing one about the chap who gets born on Christmas Day, shoots his mouth off about everything under the sun, and then comes a cropper with a couple of rum-coves on top of a hill in Johnny Arabland.
Edmund: You mean Jesus, sir?
Prince: Yes, that’s the fellow! Just leave him out of it — he always spoils the X-mas atmos.
H/T to Roger Henry for the link.
