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Opinion

No more Christ in Christmas?

Zach Lee
Opinion Columnist  

As 400-foot Christmas trees go up in malls around the nation and schoolchildren from Brownsville to Honolulu e-mail their Amazon.com wishlists to the North Pole, people somehow find a way to forget the real reason for the holiday season.

It’s about coming together as a people to celebrate the birth of Santa Claus with selfless consumerism and charge-card charity.

And that’s why it’s so disgusting that toy manufacturer one2believe would try to inject religion into such an obviously secular holiday.

In a bald-faced attempt to slip Christian beliefs into Christmas, something that will undoubtedly happen again this season, the Los Angeles company offered to donate 4,000 Bible-verse-quoting Jesus dolls to the Marine Reserves’ Toys for Tots program. 

Needless to say, the charity refused.

Such dolls send the wrong message to our nation’s children. The Bible didn’t teach about the carefree lifestyle that comes with unattainable standards of beauty, but Barbie does. Jesus didn’t tell his disciples parables about the joys of stealing cars and murdering countless law enforcement officers, but video games can.

Of course, that’s only part of the charity’s reasoning behind passing on the dolls. Bill Grein, the vice president of the charity told the Associated Press that the organization couldn’t "take a chance on sending a talking Jesus doll to a Jewish family or a Muslim family." 

This country would be in much better shape if more Americans would use that sort of reasoning.

Not only does Jesus himself take away from the consumerism celebrated every Dec. 25, but the Bible verses he spouts directly conflict with every single tenant of Judaism and Islam. Jewish and Muslim children would only be frightened and confused if their new bearded buddies tried to teach them about loving their neighbor and turning the other cheek.

And quite frankly, the 4,000 poor children who would have received the dolls have been doing just fine with their pet snails and cardboard cutouts of Paris Hilton.

If there is anything this country has too much of, it’s religious beliefs, and the people at one2believe should be ashamed of themselves for trying to slip some more into the winter holiday that is specifically set aside as a break from all of the religious values we are bombarded with every time we turn on the television.

So, as the semester comes to a close and you prepare to relax in the long lines at the Galleria this December, be on the lookout for the other wackos who would have you forget the materialism that makes this season so magical, and if you do stumble across some of them, just remember to follow the example set by the Marine Reservists.

And when you see Santa Claus making an appearance at a mall this winter, don’t forget to wish him a happy birthday.

Editor’s note: If you’ve read this far, we hope you enjoyed this piece of satire.

Send comments to dccampus@mail.uh.edu