Christmas vs Christ Mass
It is an extraordinary thing that to celebrate the birth of a God that most people don't believe in, we put ourselves through this ordeal, writes Michael Jensen. In contemporary Australia, Christmas has really become two festivals, not one. The celebration of our excessive consumption and of our yearning for connection with other people is a faint echo of the original meaning of Christmas - which was a declaration of deep peace, and the announcement of a divine gift. At least George Costanza's dad in Seinfeld was honest when he called for a festival to be named " Festivus – the festival for the rest of us ". This observation is, though, decades old. It appears in a short satirical piece by the great English apologist and author C.S. Lewis (d 1963) which was first published in 1970 but written years before. In it, he pretends to have found a lost chapter from the Greek historian Herodotus. He describes a visit to an island called Niatirb ("Britain&q