have a Holly Jolly Hurly Burly Surly Christmas?

Got cold here last night - 14 degrees (no, not Celsius). The kind of night you wish you had some extra body heat under the covers with you...although, truth be told, I don't suffer as much as many, I used to be known as "the human furnace" because I always seem to have body heat to spare).

I think I miss the extra body heat under the covers for less thermal reasons. Such is life.

In the middle of my edit-down for the show this weekend, and prep for tomorrow night's read (of course there is no mention of the benefit performance in the local newspaper, I should warn groups...get me involved in your charity, lose local coverage.

Saw the cute item on "The Daily Show" last night, pointing out (unsubtly) that Bill O'Reilly is using year-old clips to accuse Jon Stewart's staff piling on with the other "enemies of Christmas". You'd think people would have better things to do, to complain about, than whether or not others are exercising their Freedom of Speech to point out our hypocrisy when it comes to Freedom of Religion.

And, yes, for more than two decades after they arrived on these shores, our original religious asylum seekers, those mainstays of a rock-hard Christian faith, the Puritans, banned any Christmas celebration. If Fox News ever invents a time machine, I can just see them wading in on those "un-godly heathens" - the Pilgrims.

And the Apostles! They didn't keep Christmas, someone needs to tar and feather them and boycott those meetings they've been having.

I keep Christmas, I like Christmas, I say "Merry Christmas"...but I am not so arrogant as to assume everyone does or must share my views, or to accept with benumbed mind that there is anything more in our cultural celebrations we call "Christmas" to do with Yeshua Ben-Yahweh (Jesus, the Son of God to you KJV stalwarts...and "Christ" is a Greek term...He never went by Jesus or Christ in His life on Earth) than there is with Winnie the Pooh.

Come on guys, loosen your bolo ties, you're cutting off the circulation to your brain. Christianity is about love and inclusion, not drawing artificial lines in the sand and trying to start a war between denominations and with the "heathens". That wasn't Jesus' way and it isn't a way we shoudl be going to convince others of the validity of our faith.

As for the topic of Christmas as a Federal holiday. My view is that it is a recognition of the fact that Christmas is now, and has been for some time, more of a cultural celebration than a religious holiday...and, as such, groups that get too hairy about the secularization of Christmas need to sit down and read a book or two to see that this has been the case for centuries. Christmas is a fantastic opportunity for Christians to teach about their faith, not to get ugly and nasty and angry and everything else that is NOT part of the Christian doctrines. We are undermining our witness and doing a disservice to our faith and our commission when we behave in this manner.

Nuff said.