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Grumpy Garrison Keillor

Grumpy Garrison Keillor wrote in Sunday’s Op. Ed. that people who aren’t Christian should leave Christmas alone. He is tired of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Unitarians and people who rewrite, “Silent Night”. In his most astounding comment, he scorned, “. . . all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year”. “Christmas,” he wrote, “does not need any improvements”.


It is probably best not to try to figure out the “Jewish guys” comment. I do not know what their religion or ethnic identity has to do with the music they wrote. I thought they were probably just trying to earn a buck, something like writing Op. Ed. pieces.

What is really puzzling is the notion that “Christmas”, as Garrison Keillor likes to celebrate it, is something without a history. Not simply Christmas, but every celebration in the Christian Church, and every hymn and doctrine and custom, is something that has taken shape gradually. Christmas, originally, wasn’t even at Christmas time. Jesus likely was born in the springtime, not at the winter solstice. They weren’t any Christmas trees at Christmas until perhaps the middle ages. Nobody sang “Silent Night” in Bethlehem when Jesus was born.

What people believe about the importance of Jesus has changed just as much as the trappings about his birth. Keillor writes, “If you don’t believe Jesus was God, OK, go write your own damn “Silent Night” and leave ours alone”. The plain fact is that the formulation that Jesus is God is an idea that took centuries to develop. The first Biblical affirmations about Jesus is that he was a prophet of the last times who denounced the sins of his people, and who warned that judgment time was near.

We should not be surprised that people who are Christian continue to think about the importance of Jesus for their lives, and continue to find ways to express, in the worldview of our own time, what earlier generations of people expressed within the framework of their own particular worldviews. They even write, and re-write, hymns to reflect their thought.

Christmas has always had “improvements”, which is just a way of saying that if the tradition has real meaning today, it will be expressed within the framework of how we think today. That is what contitututes a living tradition, and not just a museum piece.

Merry Christmas, Mr. Keillor!

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