The Garbagey-est Can

Mary: (sigh) look honey sometimes weird institutionalized religion enforces a certain ethnocentric aesthetic on--

Videogame characters regularly do things that real life people cannot do.

- Acknowledge that Christmas is not a universal holiday and that some people either feel negatively about it or just don’t celebrate it. Stop being offended by this.

- Stop forcing people to participate. Don’t make your Jewish employees wear Christmas outfits, don’t make schoolkids be part of Christmas plays, etc.

- Stop pushing back when Jews are honest with you about how they feel about it.

- Stop deflecting to talk about how Christmas traditions are actually pagan in origin. We know, and also it’s fully irrelevant to our issues with Christmas.

- Recognize things from other cultures. Or at very least don’t *prevent* members of other cultures from expressing them. If your employee wants to put up a menorah, let them. If your coworker wants to add a Chanukah decoration to your office don’t take it down when they’re not looking because it “messes up the Christmas spirit” or whatever.

- Recognize things from different cultures at other times of the year too. Let your Jewish students and employees take days off for the fall holidays. Maybe even consider merchandise or decorations for those holidays too!

- Stop with the double standards. You don’t get to say that a menorah is religious and a Christmas tree isn’t. Either both of them are or neither of them are. A menorah actually is a ritual object but a) plenty of secular Jews use them and b) I don’t think most Christians know that, they just think of Judaism (and therefore Jewish culture) as “a religion” and Christian culture as normal. When people claim to object to Chanukah (the holiday most widely — and often exclusively — celebrated by secular Jews) because it’s “religious,” they’re actually objecting because it’s non-normative.

- Listen when someone is telling you about their experiences with and thoughts about hegemonic culture. Don’t argue that actually it’s fine becaude Christmas is secular or pagan or whatever. Trust people about the experiences they’ve had and how things impact them.

Jean Lurçat

Tapestry “D'Etoiles”, France, mid 20th C.

conservatives:

Venus Trying to Restrain Adonis from Departing for the Hunt, Peter Paul Rubens, 1700, Mauritshuis Museum

The Garden of Earthly Delights (detail), 1516, Hieronymus Bosch