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Don't Call It Christmas December 19, 2003 -- If
you like your Christmases straight -- i.e., "Merry Christmas" instead of "Season's Greetings" -- the run-up to Dec. 25 can
be a trying time. And this year the grinches are again out in full force, trying their best to strip from our public squares
any hint of what most Americans will actually be celebrating come Christmas morn. In New York City, a judge is expected to rule any day on a public-school
policy that forbids Nativity scenes while allowing Jewish menorahs and Islamic stars-and-crescents on the grounds that the
last two are secular. Likewise in Palm Beach, the city is being sued by residents who have been denied permission to place
a crèche on public property that already features a menorah. In the state of Washington, meanwhile, a music teacher who allowed
his schoolchildren a Hanukkah song expunged the word "Christmas" in "Carol From an Irish Cabin," replacing it with the words
"white winter." Even Congress now boasts a "holiday tree" instead of a Christmas tree.
Somehow we doubt that this is what Thomas Jefferson had in mind with his
wall of separation. As the Supreme Court put it in Lynch v. Donnelly (1984): "To forbid the use of this one passive symbol--the
crèche--at the very time people are taking note of the season with Christmas hymns and carols in public schools and other
public places, and while the Congress and legislatures open sessions with prayers by paid chaplains, would be a stilted overreaction
contrary to our history and to our holdings." Yet in fairness to city officials trying to navigate the shoals of political
correctness, our high court's guidelines have not been clear and consistent. And its rulings have encouraged the idea that
the only acceptable religious symbol in the public square is one stripped of its meaning. This idea was captured perfectly by the town attorney for Palm Beach, who
explains that the menorah on town property is effectively "neutralized" into a "secular display" by its placement next to
a Christmas tree. Neutralized. It helps to remember that the only reason Palm Beach even allows the menorah is that the local
Lubavitch Center filed a lawsuit back in 1995. Not least of the baleful influences on our civic life is the implicit message
that the way for citizens to gain their First Amendment rights on the public square is via pretense and dissembling. Last
year in this space we wrote about a New Jersey town that banned a local Jewish group from erecting a menorah on public property
even though it allowed a Christmas tree. With a straight face the city fathers insisted that the tree they put up each December
was not a Christmas tree at all but a "tree of lights" commemorating Pearl Harbor. As Notre Dame Law Prof. Rick Garnett notes, forcing Americans to lie about
their religious symbols does as much violence to the First Amendment as any ban. "If the point of the Establishment Clause
is to keep government out of the business of religion," he told us, "it's strange to have judges and city lawyers in the business
of declaring what people's symbols mean." And if you think labeling our spruces and firs "holiday trees" is the solution
to the season's wars, just wait until the ACLU realizes what the dictionary already makes clear: That the word "holiday" itself
comes from the Old English "holy day." Pagans Prepare to Celebrate Yule Solstice It is Yule: the festival to celebrate light, the sun and God. On the winter
solstice, which occurs December 22 this year, Botting will lead dozens of students and staff through a series of joyous Yule
rituals involving cauldrons, knives, wine, dance, cakes, holly, ivy and stag antlers. In the Anglo-Saxon and Norse pagan traditions, Yule is the New Year. "For
many pagans it is truly the darkest day of the year," Botting says. "For that reason it's the celebration of the rebirth of
the sun, and the sun is generally associated with God." On Yule, the university's interfaith chapel typically churns with pagans
marking the return of more daylight hours by swirling in a crack-the-whip-like dance, revering stag antlers because they signify
the cycle of life, and dipping a ceremonial knife into a cast-iron cauldron of wine to symbolize the unity of male and female
divinity. After five years as an administration-approved chaplain, with the right
to perform marriages at the 30,000-student public university, Botting can't prove she's unique. But, she says, "I haven't
been able to find another pagan chaplain anywhere else in the world." Botting is a pagan (also known as Wiccan) priestess in what might also
be one of the planet's most witch-friendly cities, Greater Victoria (population 280,000), where more than 1,000 people officially
told Canadian census takers they were pagans. Paganism is Canada's fastest-growing religion, according to Statistics
Canada. The number of self-declared pagans in 2001 grew by 281 percent from a decade earlier. There are now 21,080 pagans
in Canada, with 6,100 in the province of British Columbia, of which Victoria is the capital. There are more pagans on the
West Coast of Canada than there are, for instance, Salvation Army members. But Inar Hansen, vice president, or "bard," of the university's 150-member
Thorn and Oak Student Pagan Club, argues the census figures only hint at Wicca's rising popularity, especially in Victoria,
a major tourist destination. The government data don't count, he says, the many witches who have yet to "come out of the broom
closet." Hansen maintains tens of thousands of residents of North America's West
Coast--in British Columbia, Washington, Oregon and California--practice paganism, often informally and eclectically. "The
West Coast has a green, fertile energy," Hansen says, "that tends to attract pagans." The University of Victoria's acclaimed poet and English professor, the
late Robin Skelton, paved the way for sophisticated paganism in Victoria, Botting says. His daughter now runs a large pagan
group known as Thirteenth House. Botting, 55, follows in Skelton's academic tradition. With her Ph.D., she
teaches religious studies, mythology and medical sociology. A former Jehovah's Witness who left the religion decades ago,
Botting is also co-author of the acclaimed book "The Orwellian World of the Jehovah's Witnesses." In a rare example of North American pagans moving into the mainstream,
Botting and other members of the Aquarian Tabernacle Church won government approval in the late 1990s to legally conduct marriages,
after being officially recognized as a religion. Yule (from the Old English word referring to the winter season) is one
of eight big pagan rituals each year, Botting says--even though not all pagans treat Yule as a New Year's celebration; many
mark the new year on Halloween on Oct. 31, or what witches call Samhain. A useful way to think about Yule, Botting explains, is as a celebration
of God as "the Winter-born king," as an event which symbolizes the rebirth of the life-sustaining spirit. In the fourth century, Botting says, Roman Emperor Constantine, a convert
to Christianity, created today's Christmas event by borrowing from a highly popular pagan winter festival similar to Yule.
Constantine chose Dec. 25, when sunshine hours began to grow longer in the Northern Hemisphere, as the time to celebrate the
sacred birth of Jesus. "There are real parallels between the pagan and Christian traditions," Botting says. "In both paganism
and Christianity, the winter solstice would be the celebration of the birth of light, of divine light, of regeneration." Botting says many members of school's Thorn and Oak Pagan Students Club
who take part in Yule festivities originally hail from smaller towns. Before arriving on campus, she says, many tended to practice witchcraft
on their own, with books bought from bookstores, which these days sport typically large sections on witchcraft. They might
also have enjoyed witch-based shows as "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," "The Craft" or "Practical Magic." "As chaplain, the students
come to see me with standard student issues: They wonder what they're doing with their lives. But they also want to know more
about pagan tradition," Botting says. "Some of them come to our community rituals expecting weird things to happen.
Some might think witchcraft is used to magically control people. But they soon learn that's not what witchcraft is about.
It's about the Earth and the cycle of life." Hansen, a 27-year-old pagan leader in his last year of nursing studies,
says he and his girlfriend, who helps lead rituals, find many students come to campus believing witchcraft is about casting
magic spells. "They're insecure. They're looking for power outside themselves," he says. "But the key to paganism is to `know
thyself,' to find balance within yourself and the universe, to feel the life energy, which is both male and female, and realize
witchcraft is not about hocus-pocus." While Botting hasn't witnessed serious discrimination against pagans while
she's been on campus, Hansen regrets how the student pagan club's posters are often defaced with phrases such as "Christ is
Lord." Paganism is open to psychic phenomena, but Hansen says the last thing he
wants is to revere evil spirits. Many conservative religious people are taught paganism is about worshipping Satan, he said.
"But it has nothing to do with that." -- By Douglas Todd for the Religion News Service
Yahoo! Groups Forum
New art and artists in the galleries.
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