Last night was enemy_anime's Christmas party. You *know* it's a good party when it trickles down at about 3 am with an argument about which was geekier, playing Star Wars trivial pursuit or Dungeons and Dragons.

And then I had to get up early and go to church. This time of year I always start feeling very Hindu.

It starts with the whole chrismaramahannazaa 'war on Christmas' nonsense, which just makes me want to wish everyone a happy Diwali (even though Diwali was way back at the beginning of November this year - but then, Ramadan was in October, and that hasn't stopped anyone.)

And then in Church today, Pastor said in his sermon that the special thing about Christianity - the thing that no other major religion believes, the point of belief that is so hard for non-Christians to understand - is that our God chose to come down to Earth, incarnate as a human. So, the Ramayana and the Bhaghavad-Gita are just poems from a minor, unimportant religion then, 13% of the Earth's population nonwithstanding?

It's not that I want to belittle Christ's incarnation; it is one of the parts of the faith that I find most valuable, but it is *not* what makes Christianity special. Most religions have a god incarnate as a central figure; Islam and Judaism are almost unique in *not* having one. And the Christmas story itself was, as far as anyone can tell, stolen whole cloth from various pagan traditions. So if you want to focus on *that*, you ought to talk about how Christ was different from the others - how he was born to an unwed mother, how he lived in a thoroughly ordinary, thoroughly middle-class family rather than as a prince or a beggar, so that the only thing special about him was that he was Christ. Or you could talk about how he was long-awaited yet unexpected, like babies so often are, and how faith can be like a child coming into your life, and ruling by serving as a parent does - why the Beatitudes are so important, since we *read* them earlier in the service. Or you could go really scholarly and talk about family and society then, in Judaea, about what it meant to be a first-born son in a Jewish family (and what it would have meant if Joseph *hadn't* married her), and the ways in which layers of myth built up around the Holy Family over the millennia, as society's expectations changed. Or half a dozen other things that would be interesting ways of seeing Christmas again.

There's just so *much* more you can get from that story of the Annunciation without having to ignore actual *facts*. But then again, maybe that's too much to expect from an average, and averagely apathetic, Christian congregation these days.

Anyway, it's possible (though unlikely) that he at least mentioned some of that in the last half of the sermon; after I got fed up with his logic I dozed off and dreamed about grays and the black oil. (Let's put the X back in X-mas!)

I also got to put together a cardboard Nativity scene, printed by Lutheran Brotherhood, which had been in the back of a church closet since 1970. It was *awesome*. The back of the stable has a hole in it so that if you position it right, the Christ child is bathed in light while the rest of the scene is dark.