http://michaelbgreen.com.au/buy-nothing-christmas/ Journalist, producer and oral historian Sun, 11 Dec 2011 07:21:37 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.1 http://michaelbgreen.com.au/buy-nothing-christmas/#comment-159 Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000 #comment-159 Amazing how cultures change, those of Chrisitan beliefs lament the hijacking of Christmas by commercialisation. How ironic that Christmas was hijacked by Christianity, it originally never represented the birth of Christ, but the returning of the light from the shortest day in a European winter. The pine tree a sympbol of evergreen in the middle of white snow and the candles of the returning light. However, beside that point, even before Christianity it would have never respresented a shopocalypse. St. Nicolaus ( later abbreviated to Santa Claus) brought nuts and other rare delights. Life forces were highly respected in those pagan days, the religious symbol being the tree ( which as a point of interest, was at a later date carved in stone on a church as bent over and trodden on by one of the disciples of Jesus, and subsequently the foot of this disicple was hacked away so it couldn’t down tread the tree anymore – an everlasting monument to the conflict of the hijacking of the time). At any rate, a time of year to reflect life whether from either Christian or pre-Christian beliefs and not a time to disrespect the earth we live on,  by one’s own wasteful actions.

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