What if the Western World is the "special case"?

Pastoral scene, pre Soviet Ukrainian village.  Not a lot of homsexuality, transgenderism, etc. going on there.

Those who protest vehemently belong to small ideological groups," Francis told Italian newspaper La Stampa. "A special case are Africans: for them homosexuality is something 'bad' from a cultural point of view, they don't tolerate it".

"But in general, I trust that gradually everyone will be reassured by the spirit of the 'Fiducia Supplicans' declaration by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith: it aims to include, not divide," the pope said.

We all see things through thick lenses of our cultures, and the history of our cultures.  This was true even of the authors of the Gospels, which sometimes come through on certain items in their writings. 

I think Fiducia Supplicans demonstrates this.

For that matter, to use a bad secular example, I think Justice Kennedy's opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges did as well, which is not to say that the documents are analagous. They are not.

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy seems to have generally believed that the Obergefell decision overturning tens of thousands of years of understanding on the nature of marriage would be met with rapid universal acceptance, rather than turning out to be the metaphorical shot heard around the world that gave us Donald Trump in short order.¹

The Supreme Court, in Obergefells, and the Papacy, in Fiducia Supplicans, are reacting to the same development seem to have made the assumption of thinking that what happens in European cultures is what happens, or what even really is of major concern, all over the world.  That just isn't the case in this instance.

A pretty good case can be made that "homosexuality", as Western Society regards it, doesn't even exist, although certainly same sex attraction and sexual conduct does. They are not the same thing.  Therefore, when the Pope says "A special case are Africans: for them homosexuality is something 'bad' from a cultural point of view, they don't tolerate it" it might in fact be the case that the opposite is true.  That is, the "special case" is Western Europeans, for whom homosexuality exists, and is not a "something 'bad'", or at least a significant number of Western Europeans, of which North and South Americans are (once again) part, have now been schooled or accepted that it isn't bad.

In most, of the world, homosexuality is regarded as a European thing.  Again, the conduct occurs, but not the gender characterization.  And in no society, does it occur with the frequency it does in Western Society, which is also the society which as become the most libertine, albeit only in the last seventy years, particularly in regard to sex and manifestations of sex, including outward manifestations of sex.

We've dealt with that before, but now that It's come back up in this fashion, it's worth looking at again.  Pretty much everywhere this conduct occurs, it's strongly associated with a variety of factors, one of which, in its broad manifestation we now see, is a wealthy society that has lots of idle time.  Put another way, it's a factor of resources and availability to them.

This is true of a lot of human disorders that are closely related to elemental needs and what we tend to universally see is that when we have a society that is heavily deprived of an elemental needs, a disordered desire for it, combined with disorder conduct, pops up in a minority (never a majority) of the population.

Food is a good example.

Scarcity of food will result in a massively strong desire to eat.  In some people, that leads to desperate acts under desperate situations.  Cannibalism, for example, comes to mind in regard to the Donner Party, or the residents of Leningrad.  People took measures they normally wouldn't.

Not everyone did, however.

At least in the Soviet examples, which repeated in various fashions from 1917 through early 1944, most people didn't.  People would starve instead.

Conversely, in food situations where there's a surplus of food, the entire population will tend to gain weight, but not everyone tends to become excessively overweight.  Modern dieticians will yell in horror at this, but overweight, and truly grossly obese are not the same things.  Grossly obese happens for a number of reasons, including people having a makeup which is extremely efficient in order to avoid famine, but it's only in an unnatural situation of surplus calories that it manifest itself.  

As a scene in Sam Peckinpah's Major Dundee presents it:

Sergeant Chillum:  Don't look to me like them gut-eaters has been feeding them very good.

Wiley: Did you ever see a fat Apache?

Sergeant Chillum: I ain't yet.

This scene depicts the pick up cavalry formation taking the kidnapped children and feeding them, but the point raised, accidentally, is a good one.  Native Americans lived in a state of nature, and in that state, they were in good shape and not packing around extra weight.  No culture in a state of nature does.

When things become disordered, such as in famine, some people will do something that can be argued to be disordered, eat other people.  When there's too much food and no real need to work too hard, physically, to obtain calories, everyone puts on weight, but some will very much to their detriment.

So what's this have to do with homosexuality, let alone Fiducia Supplicans? Well, quite a lot, really.

Just as, in a balanced state of nature, or close to one, people don't get fat, and don't turn to cannibalism, in a balanced state of nature, they don't turn to the range of sexual deviations that they do in an unbalanced one.

Edgar Paxon's Custer's Last Stand.  While it might seem odd to see this posted here, the Cheyenne and Sioux warriors who won this battle, and one just days before it at Rosebud, were never more than a day's ride from their families.  Women were of course present in the Native camp at Little Big Horn, as the battle was brought on by the 7th Cavalry's attack on the village, but at least one native woman had been present at Rosebud as well.  Native raiding parties might separate from their families for a period of days, but not months.

In a state of nature, people live in pretty small communities and there's pretty much a 1 to 1 sex ratio.  Men would only be separated from women for very brief periods of time.  A war party, for example, might separate for several days, but not months. The Great Raid of 1840, for example, which is regarded as the largest Native American raid every conducted, just lasted two days.  Add in travel, and the warrior bands were gone longer, but it probably wasn't much more than a week, if that long.

Hunting parties are also often cited for periods of separation, but in a healthy native state, the separation was often just a matter of hours.  Women were usually close enough to a really large hunting party that they could partake in the processing of the game.  There were undoubtedly exceptions, but by and large, this was the rule.

Taking the war example again, consider this from Ethiopia's mobilization order of 1935 when Italy invaded:

Everyone will now be mobilized, and all boys old enough to carry a spear will be sent to Addis Ababa. Married men will take their wives to carry food and cook. Those without wives will take any woman without a husband. Anyone found at home after the receipt of this order will be hanged.

Emperor Haile Selassie

Married men, take your wives.  Not married?  Find a woman who isn't married and taker her.

It's only once you begin to mess with the basic human living patters that the opposite is true.  Industrialization, which we'll get to in a moment, really brought in a major disruption from the normal living patter, but there are preindustrial examples that are notable.  War provides a pretty good example again.

Major military campaigns in antiquity relied on theft of food, which is not ordered, and which is well known.  If the fighters were separated from women, they also rapidly descended to disorder.  Early military campaigns (and some recent ones) are famously associated with "rape and pillage", and by men who would not ordinarily do that.  

Another example of adjusting to desperate times might be taken in Muhammed authoring his troops, who were ready to go home as they were tired of being without their wives, to have sex with their female saves taken in war.  This is widely denied by Muslim scholars today, but it seems to be fairly well established and in fact the practice has been resumed by Islamic fundamentalist armed bands and its the origin of Muslim sex slave trading, which is an historical fact. That this is basically an example of licensed rape can't really be denied.

Conversely, in Christian societies the "marital debt" was taken very seriously up until recently, and it was taken so seriously in the Middle Ages that a wife of a man who wished to go on crusade could veto it simply by citing the marital debt.  That's fairly extraordinary, but telling, in that she could simply declare that if her husband departed her needs in this category might cause her to fall into sin, and therefore, he couldn't go.  Moderns like to look down on such things today, but in reality that was a very natural and realistic view of human sexuality.

Same gender attractions play in here too, but within bands of men kept away from women for long periods of time.  The most famous example of that may be the Spartans, who were fierce warriors trained from young adulthood, in the case of men, to be soldiers.  However, the warehousing of men, and boys, away from women brought about widespread homosexual conduct as the living conditions were, rather obviously, completely abnormal.

So too are much of our current living patters.

Industrialization separated men from women and parent from child in a major way, recreating the abnormality of living conditions noted above on a society wide level.

And that's deeply unnatural.

It wasn't until the Industrial Revolution that men left their homes every day, working long hours, and were separated from their wives and children for what amounts to well over half of their adult waking hours.  And this was not only true of industrial laborers, but also of their white collar bosses.  In many industrial societies, moreover, this was amplified by the fact that men further segregated themselves, or were segregated by society, even on off hours.

It was essayist Henry Fairlie who noted:

Work still gives meaning to rural life, the family and churches.  But in the city today, work and home, family and church, are seperated.  What the office workers do for a living is not part of thier home life.  AT the same time they maintain the pointless frenzy of hteir work hours on thier off hours.  They rush form the office to jog, to the gym or the YMCA pool to work at their play with the same joylessness.

Fairlie wrote this in 1986, well after the most aggressors conditions of the Industrial Revolution had slackened, but he did note in The Idiocy of Urban Life what that had been like.  Men left early in the morning and walked, on average, seven miles to work. They worked their all day, and then returned home after twelve hours of labor.  Well over half their day had been spent away from their family.

By the 20th Century that had, in many heavily industrial regions, created a new pattern of living he didn't address, and one which lasted well into the 1970s.  Men left for work in blue collar jobs, worked all day with other men, and at quitting time, they hit the bars.  Men in the American Rust Belt, for instance, commonly hit a bar every night on the way home, spending a couple of hours drinking beer in an all male company, save for the barmaids whose tips went up as the beer flowed.  Rough and tumble places, these were not the equivalent of charming English or Irish pubs of the same period.  The maleness, if you will, of their work was all the more amplified by the nearly universal membership of men in organizations that excluded women.

Not surprisingly, this all encouraged conventional sexual vice.  Some men, a minority but nonetheless an appreciable nature, took the jousting with bar maid and waitresses further, with some of the women reciprocating.  When Hank Thompson and Kitty Wells sang about the "wild side of life" it's easy to wonder why they were hanging out in bars, not really appreciating that a lot of men in particular simply did.  Indeed, the term "family man", conversely, had real meaning.

Not to dump this exclusively on blue collar workers by any means, philandering conduct was common in the white collar world as well, to such an extent that it became instantly recognizable to people who went to see 1960's The Apartment, the entire theme of which plays out through the vehicle of cheating married executives using their younger colleagues' apartment.

Indeed, when I was young, I can recall my parents openly talking about professionals in town who had affairs and mistresses.  This certainly didn't include anyone in my family, which was 100% Catholic and meant it.  That conduct was clearly not approved of, but my point is that it occured.  While never discussed in this fashion, in the context of what we're discussing here, the mistresses were sometimes targets of opportunity, so to speak.  Secretaries and assistants.  Indeed, I heard a lawyer of the generation prior to mine, once relate of the generation of lawyers two generations older than hers, that quite a few of the paralegals of that old, now largely dead or very old, were effectively mistresses.  One such assistant had mysteriously had a child out of wedlock when that was pretty rare, and it was widely known who teh employer father was.

There's a lot more that could be explored here, but the point is that the contra natural working conditions give rise to departures from morality and nature.  Even now, or particularly now, you'll hear a close female colleague of a male be referred to as his "work wife".  I've even heard a person refer to herself that way.  Work wives have no marital debt, but hidden by the statement is the vague suggestion or fear that they might be providing such a service, illicit thought it would be.

Homosexuality, in large part, comes about, I strongly suspect, due to something similar.

In an earlier thread, we noted that there are in fact cultures that not only have low incidents of homosexual conduct, but none.  As we earlier posted:

Somewhat related to this, interestingly enough, I also came upon an article by accident on the Aka and Ngandu people of central Africa, who are branches of the Bushmen, or what some people still call "pygmies".  They've been remarkably resilient in staying close to nature.

A hunter-gatherer people, they naturally fascinate Western urbanites, and have been studied for many years by Barry and Bonnie Hewlett, a husband and wife anthropologist team.  Starting off with something else, after a period of time the Washington State University pair "decided to systematically study sexual behavior after several campfire discussions with married middle-aged Aka men who mentioned in passing that they had sex three or four times during the night. At first [they] thought it was just men telling their stories, but we talked to women, and they verified the men's assertions."

The study revealed some interesting things, besides that, which included that they regarded such interaction as a species of work, designed for procreation.  Perhaps more surprising to our genital focused society, they had no concept of homosexuality at all, no practice of that at all, and additional had no practice or concept of, um. . . well . . .self gratification.  You'll have to read between the lines on that one.

Perhaps the Synod on Synodality ought to take note of the reality of the monotheist Aka's and Ngandu's as that's exactly what the Catholic faith has always taught.¹ And so it turns out in a society that's actually focused that way, what Catholics theology traditionally has termed disordered, just doesn't occur.  It's also worth noting that the rise of homosexuality really comes about after men were dragged out of the household's on a daily basis by social and economic causes, and the rise of . . . um., well, anyhow, recently is heavily tied to the pornificaiton of the culture that was launched circa 1953.

In other words, those like Fr. James Martin who seek a broader acceptane of of sexual disorder, might actually be urging the acceptance of a byproduct of our overall economic and social disorder, which itself should be fixed.

But what would be the conditions that bring it about in our culture?

We're not even supposed to ask that now, but for most people who have same sex attraction, it's a pretty heavy cross to bear.  We should be looking at how it comes about.

Well, what we know is that if we separate men from women, particularly in their formative years, we'll get it at a higher rate than when that doesn't occur.

Going back to war, that fountain of all problematic things, we can look back as far as the Spartans to find this.  Spartans, faced with a constant threat of war, took up separating men from women large-scale and raising boys in barracks.  It also had a notable degree of homosexual conduct.

Hmmm. . . separate young men and keep them separates just as things begin, for lack of a better way to put it, turn on, and . . . .

The Spartans were a notable early example of this, which in turn tends to be exaggerated.  It's not likely that every single Spartan male was a homosexual.  It's also not the case, as is sometimes suggested, that Ancient Greece was wildly homosexual.  Indeed, Plato abhorred it and regarded it as contrary to nature and proposed the Athenian assembly ban homosexual acts, masturbation, and illegitimate sex in general.

Going forward in time, when we really start to see references to the acts (but not a claimed "homosexual" status) comes with the first semi modern navies.  It was a constant concern, for instance, of the Royal Navy, which perhaps might be regarded as the first modern navy.  A great navy, it was not necessarily recruited in the most charming way and many sailors were simply press-ganged, a type of conscription, into it against their will.  As press gangs favored hitting bars in ports, many of the men conscripted into the Royal Navy already lacked a strong attachment to home and family, and ports were notoriously associated with prostitution.  Anyhow, a lot of men away from sea for months, or years, at a time, and a lot of them being fairly young. . . well the problem rose again.

It replicated itself in large modern armies as well, interestingly often among the officer class.  In European armies where the officer class was made up of minor nobility as a rule, the men in it had entered as the only other real employment option, if they were not set to inherit the estate, was the clergy.  In some European armies officers were strongly discouraged from marrying, which in part reflected the fact that their pay was very bad, as their countries knew that they could rely on family money. While it didn't occur universally in every such army, in some, such as the pre World War One German Army, there was a strong streak of hidden homosexuality.

English private schools, which were widely used by the upper class, were notorious for homosexuality for the same reason.  Homosexual conduct became so common in them that homosexuality used to be referred to elsewhere as "the English Disease".  Private schools were segregated effectively by class, and very much by gender.  Unlike the charming portrayal in the Harry Potter series of works, boys went to boys schools and girls to girls school.  Quite often, over time, parents enrolled their children in the same schools they'd gone to.  Overtime, a closeted institutional homosexuality, or at least its common occurrence, crept in.

It could be legitimately asked how on earth any of this relates to our current era, but it does in more ways than we might imagine.

In most Western societies today, we make no effort, for the most part, to separate men and women in anything, formally.  But as we've already detailed, we do send men, and now women, out of their families and into an unnatural environment on a daily basis.  People often meet their future spouses in periods of time when young people are constantly together, such as in school or university, but as soon as they are established, we pull them apart.

Starting during World War Two, moreover, a false academia combined with the corruption and destruction of the war, gave rise to the Sexual Revolution.  We commonly think of that as arriving in the 60s, but in reality it probably really started in the 1940s with the publication of Kinsey's false academic narratives. That was the first shot, so to speak, and the publication of Playboy the second one.  While Playboy was opposed in some localities into the 1980s, by the 1950s it was so well established, in spite of completely rejecting conventional morality, and in spite, moreover, of publishing photos of women younger than 18, that the ground had been massively lost.  The pill followed in the early 60s, work patterns changed due to the introduction of domestic machinery, and sexual morality took a beating.  Once its natural purpose was obscured, and then lost, which really basically took all the way into the 1990s, the widespread acceptance of homosexual sex was inevitable.

None of which means that a large number of people will take it up.

But what does mean, that some people, in some circumstances, will. And the unnatural conditions that we live in, amplified by societal moorings having been cut by the Sexual Revolution, help bring that about.  And as society has chosen to simply embrace everything that deviates from the norm, and natural, as it applies to ourselves, those afflicted have almost no place to go, but deeper in, no matter how destructive that may be.

All of which is a good reason that people in this circumstance need blessings, if blessing are properly understood.

And which would, therefore, support Fiducia Supplicans.

But none of which suggests that the Church's view on sex is what is causing a decline in attendance in  Europe, and that a wider acceptance of homosexuality as normal, as some would urge, would actually do anything.  This all is a problem in the West, to be sure, but the underlying evolution of thought that some have, that this is all natural, is not supported by the evidence.

The evidence supports the contrary.

Which gets us back to our original point.  African and Asia, for all of their problems, have lived closer to nature, longer, than we have.  But that is rapidly changing, and in much of Asia in particular it already has. People who like to imagine that there is such a thing as broad progress, for which there is no good evidence, would argue that this is all progress, so that everything we have noted as a byproduct of the evolution of industry in the West will necessarily happen everywhere else. But that's not necessarily the case at all.

And indeed, in the West itself there seem to be an awakening of tradition, and a desire to return to a more rooted lifestyle.  Ironically, evolutions in technology may bring that about.  We know that populations are declining everywhere in the Western Northern Hemisphere, which is seen as a disaster but which in fact may emphasize this sort of return to the village.

Footnotes:

1.  Obergefell is an incredibly weak decision which, if it were to reappear in front of the United States Supreme Court today, would be reversed.  My prediction is that it will be within the next decade as it devoid of solid legal reasoning.

When it was handed down, it was my prediction here that it would cause massive social disruption and resistance, which in fact it has.  Pollsters like to point out that the views on same gender unions have moved greatly since it was handed down, which is true, but what they seem to miss is that it was basically the last straw on the part of traditional social conservatives, as well as (Southern type) populists on forced social change.  The latter group had long ago accommodated itself to divorce, to people shacking up, and begrudgingly to homosexual conduct but it wasn't about to be told that homosexual unions equated with marriage.  In very real terms, Anthony Kennedy, whether he realizes it or not, has always been Donald Trump's running mate.

Related Threads:

The Overly Long Thread. Gender Trends of the Past Century, Definitions, Society, Law, Culture and Their Odd Trends and Impacts.

On International Women's Day, 2023.

Delia Kane, age 14.  The Exchange Luncheon, Boston.  January 31, 1917.

Today is International Women's Day.  Some prior entries:

International Women's Day, 2020

Thursday, March 8, 2018

International Women's Day, 2018

Today is International Women's Day, as March 8 always is.

I've put this poster up before, it apparently means something like "let's rebuild together", perhaps an appropriate slogan for International Women's Day 2018.

I'm not sure what I make of this day, as I find myself in the category, quite often, of marveling at modern contemporary society struggling to cure its ills created by becoming too modern by reaching vaguely out towards the standards of the past.  And frankly International Women's Day has a rather Communist, if you will, sound to it.

German "Women's Day" poster from 1914.  This poster was rather obviously sponsored by the German Socialist left.  It was also banned by the Imperial German government.

None of which would mean that the day, which has been endorsed for some time by the United Nations, isn't legitimate.  Nor would my comments suggest that women don't deserve an International Day.  Indeed, they do.

And on that, the theme for 2018 perhaps very ably demonstrates that.  The theme this year is "Time is Now: Rural and urban activists transforming women’s lives."  The UN says of this year's theme:

This year’s theme captures the vibrant life of the women activists whose passion and commitment have won women’s rights over the generations, and successfully brought change. We celebrate an unprecedented global movement for women’s rights, equality, safety and justice, recognizing the tireless work of activists who have been central to this global push for gender equality.

All that's probably true, and indeed brave women all over the world do struggle, as noted.  Cudos to the UN for noting it, even if the UN rather oddly regards nations co-equally that abuse women's rights, as well as act anti democratically in all sorts of other ways.

In the US I suspect that there won't be much attention to the plight of rural women around the globe. There should be, but we're in the second half of the "Me Too" era which demonstrates a different set of problems. . . maybe. . . for women. An age-old one that social progressive keep trying to solve by suggesting that that they've discovered a new standard that's actually a very, very old one.  That's had its own interesting dynamics, as those same forces struggle not to admit the historical truth that equality for women is a movement that's not only western, but Christian.  There's a reason that western societies are in the forefront of this movement, and always have been, and that's where that reason is to be found.

Friday, March 10, 2017

Some times you can't win for losing. . .

Pity poor Sophie Gergoir Trudeau.

Yes, pity her.

And this from somebody who doesn't care much for her husband, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Sophie Gregoire Trudeau, who is married to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, is taking heat over an International Women's Day post.

She asked people to "celebrate the boys and men in our lives who encourage us to be who we truly are, who treat girls & women with respect" on 8 March. 
Ms Gregoire Trudeau urged followers to post images with their "male ally".

But some Facebook commenters said Ms Gregoire Trudeau's post was "tone deaf" and even "shameful".

The post included a photo of her and her husband holding hands.

• Sophie Gregoire Trudeau: Canadian PM wife sparks 'help' debate
• International Women's Day 2017: History, strikes and celebrations

"Why do we have to celebrate men on international women's day?" Facebook user Bibi Ebel said in one popular comment. "I am puzzled.

"There are so many things that can be done to celebrate women, and yet the call goes out to celebrating men. Allies and unity are crucial, but so is womanhood.

From the BBC.

She received support as well.

Still, what this does, I think, is illustrate the extent to which in the Western World some focus on things because their real goals have been signficantly achieved.  Yes, women have not achieved full equality anywhere. But enormous strides have been made in the Western World and countries influenced by the Western World.  Indeed, to such an extent that a heavy element of the unreal attaches to events like this and they lose their legitimate focus.

So, well I think that PM Trudeau comes across poorly in my book, politically, give Sophie Gregoire a break for goodness sake.

Well, all the prior entries, apparently.

I'm really only going to note a couple of ironies associated with this deserving day, and it is a deserving one.

The great accomplishment in the West, that Westerners honor, is basically extracting women from family life, just as men had successfully been extracted, in the 18th and 19th Centuries, in order to make them greater servants of the economy.  Yes, huge strides in equality have been made, but an understanding of organic domestic and familial Christian equality was largely lost, with a later overall loss of equality in that women's roles are now, in a greater sense, once again chosen for them.  I.e, they've gone, in the West, from having few options available to them and those in a limited number of "traditional" roles, to now having no easy option to adopt the traditional ones while being saddled with an expectation of non-domestic employment.  The direction remains, forcing that conclusion, although it likely won't be.  Indeed, my prediction is that in the upcoming and scary world of AI we're entering just now, the impact on women may prove to be considerably different from that upon men.  The fact that I'm unlikely to be around to really witness it doesn't hurt my feelings, however, as the new AI world stands to be so troubling.

Another irony is that in our present age, when women have in fact made so many strides, women find their hard won status in the world threatened by the rising tide of faux women, men who have chosen to pretend to be women and to demand female status.  This is something that is only safe to do now, in part, as women fought for the right to be treated equally in society, even if they haven't fully achieved it.  It's no accident that not too many men chose to assume female roles when being a woman meant second class status and relegation to a domestic role.  Men affecting a female appearance, in other words, aren't going to find a world in which they're confronted with no female sports, and no women in the boardrooms and courtrooms, etc.  They won't be confronted by the hard lives that were the female routine up until mid 20th Century, which is not to say that male roles, which were different, weren't pretty hard as a rule as well.

Man works till set of sun,

Woman's work is never done.

Indeed, in some ways, women in achieving greater equality have not only had some "male roles" opened up to them, but have been a bit forced into them. This lets men who think they wish to appear as women, for whatever reason, retain male roles, with no real risk of living women's real lives.

Mid Week At Work: Realities of the marketplace. Discrimination, the Old Law, Circumstances and Nature

I had one item here I was going to cautiously blog about, and then a second came up by surprise.  I'll start with the second and take it first.

I ought to note that these are both items that figure into the "fools rush in" category of things.

Dissing the Guard

National Guard M88, South Korea, 1987.

A friend of mine called me up mad.

He and I had been National Guardsmen together at about the same time.

"Yeoman, you and I both took basic and advanced training at the same time and you know that we were at Ft. Sill so long that we received discharges from the Regular Army".

"Um, yeah. . .?"

"Then why aren't we veterans?"

"Um, well Phil, we are. . . "

Phil went on. What he meant was that while we are both veterans, with honorable discharges from the U.S. Army, we don't qualify as veterans for Federal employment consideration.

Phil is correct. According to an online Guard publication that's supposed to be in the nature of good news for former Guard members:

ARLINGTON, Va. – A recently signed law gives official veteran status to National Guard members who served 20 years or more. Previously, Guard members were considered veterans only if they served 180 days or more in a federal status outside of training.

Twenty years or more. . . 

Phil lost his job in the oil slide that's been going on over the past year and he's been looking for a new one.  He's not out of work actually, he's a handy guy and one of those people who seems to pick up employment even with things are in the dumps.  Having worked at the same place for now 30+ years I'm not a handy guy, that way, and even though I can do a lot of things, I know that if the same thing happened to me, I'd be doomed.

"Thirty years as a lawyer?  Go apply at the U.S. Attorney's office. . ."

"But sir, I'm the only living person who knows how to plow a field with a California Plow and a mule named Sparky and. . ."

"U.S. Attorney's office. . . "

You get the picture.

California plow.

Or so I suppose.  I haven't seen any job openings for plowmen and for that matter, while I know what a California Plow is, I don't actually know how to plow with one with any sort of equine, let alone a mule named Sparky.

Which raises another point, one touched on below, but I'll get back to that.

I loved being in the National Guard and was in it for six years.  So was Phil.  That is, he was in for six years.  I don't know if he loved the Guard but he didn't complain about it.  Anyhow, we were in during the Cold War, which is significant here as it means that during our six years of service we were trained in, and told to expect, fighting the Red Menace.

It wasn't really obvious at the time that the Red Menace was having serious problems.  Reddit Marxists would claim that's because "real" Socialism has never been tried, but the experiment wasn't working well and Poland left the orbit, followed by the collapse of the USSR.  China was still a menace at the time, of course, but it wasn't acting like Wilhelmian Germany yet and was mostly a menace in its own neighborhood.  Of course there was North Korea, like now, which makes a theme out of menacing.

Anyhow, during the Cold War era reservists didn't see much activation for small wars as, for one reason, there weren't very many small wars that the U.S. directly got into, as once it did, they turned into big wars.  So, while the US messed around in central Africa and in Central America, it mostly did it in the late Cold War stage through proxies or clandestinely.  

Once the USSR collapsed, that changed.  In 1980 going into a war in Iraq would have been dicey with the USSR so near.  In 1990, with the Soviet Union folding up, not so much.

So we drilled and trained and went to war games.  But we never shot at Ivan, or Lee, or Chan.  

Which is just fine.

But apparently that's not good enough for the Federal Government if you are seeking employment.

Cold War reservists can't claim veterans status of Federal employment forms.

My supposition is that post Cold War ones called into active service for various wars we've fought since 1990 can, because they were activated and therefore qualify.

Which is odd as Phil and I are veterans for other things.  Indeed, it was once suggested to me that for some sort of vaccination I ought to go to the VA, which wouldn't have occurred to me otherwise.

Is Phil right that this is unfair?

Well, my instinct is that he's right.  We served for six years in a climate which actually was dangerous to some degree.  If there'd been the war we were training for, we would have had to go, and there's a good chance a lot of us wouldn't have come back.  Our combat rating was as high as the Regular Armies, and just because we were also training from home doesn't really make an intrinsic difference in that.  Sgt. Smith serving in the RA at Ft. Sill and Sgt. Smith working at Haliburton in Wyoming both would have seen the same combat experience.  But only one of them is eligible to claim veterans status for Federal employment.

Without knowing for sure, I suspect that some of this is a legacy of really long prejudice in the active military against the Guard, and some of it is lingering prejudice from the Vietnam War.  Thanks to Robert Strange McNamara and his bad of deluded technocrats combined with the bumbling of Lyndon Johnson the Guard was not deployed to the Vietnam War until late.  The irony is that the US used the Guard in every major war of the 20th Century and couldn't have fought any of them, save for Vietnam, without the Guard.

The mishandling of the Army, including its reserve components, during the Vietnam War nearly destroyed the entire Army during the war and didn't lasting damage to the Guard's reputation.  Often missed in the story is that by end of the Vietnam War the U.S. Army was in such bad shape that it was rapidly reaching the point of combat ineffectiveness in the war and it was in a very sorry situation everywhere else.  The Guard had declined during the war as well as it became a haven for those trying to evade active service, although following the war it rapidly became a haven for combat vets that weren't able to adjust back to civilian life, meaning that it had an inordinate number of combat veterans.  By the late 1970s both forces were rebounding and today they're both excellent.

Be that as it may, the intentional decision not to deploy the Guard during the Vietnam War in order to avoid community discontent by removing a large number of men from any one town lead to some prejudice against it that lingered really until the Gulf War.  Never mind that those soldiers who served in it during the Cold War would have been just as likely to die in any major conflict as a soldier of the Regular Army, and also never mind that by and large the US avoided the small wars that its fought since the collapse of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, out of a fear that they'd turn into big wars.  And, as noted, the Regular military has had a prejudice against the Guard that runs back to the 19th Century, even though time and time again its proven unmerited.

So, while I don't know this for certain, I suspect that Guardsmen and Reservists whose Regular service was for training, no matter how long, are dissed in Federal employment due to a legacy of this prejudice.

Or maybe because I was a Guardsmen who holds an Honorable Discharge from the Regular Army, I just think its unfair as Phil does.  A personal connection with things will do that.

I'll note by the way that for some of us, that six years meant a lot more than "drills on weekends and two weeks in the summer".  For one thing, some summer ATs actually run three, not two, weeks in length.  Be that as it may if I include time in which I was simply employed at the armory by the unit in the summer, it's add about eight months of service to my original RA three, which would give me element months.  Add to that actual drill times and training periods outside of the summer, I'm up over that.  I figured once that I had about two years of time, cumulative, serving.

No matter, it wasn't twenty reserve time.  So you can't claim the status for Federal employment purposes.  It doesn't matter if your job was combat arms and the guy you are competing against manned the soft serve ice-cream machine in San Diego. . .he's getting the status and you are not.

Oorah.

The Old Rules on Male/Female Employment remain more than people imagine.

It's really common for articles to appear once per year decrying, and legitimately so, the inequality between the pay of men and women.

It's not that easy of a story, however, as often men's pay is due to their being in occupations that men gravitate towards and women do not, and often they're hard, physical and dangerous jobs.  In Wyoming, where the income inequality is huge, lots of men have in recent decades worked as oilfield roughnecks.

Very few women have.

But it's a well paying job.

Statistics report that women still make less in truly equal positions, such as, supposedly, female lawyers making less then men, but I somewhat doubt those figures and if that was true, it's rapidly ceasing to be true.

The point may be that, in spite of the efforts of the Woke to compel people to believe that all occupations are gender neutral, in reality they aren't, and men and women tend to gravitate towards certain types of employment.

And one of those areas is the home, for women.

I don't mean to suggest that this is a poor choice in any fashion whatsoever, but rather note that this is a reality.

The reason that this came to mind, although I've thought about posting on it before, is also due to a discussion with a friend. The friend just turned 50 years of age and is now really focused on retirement.

It's an odd focus in his case as he has five children and none of them are out of school yet.  None. That means that he has years and years to go in which they'll be in school, and then in university.  I don't know the ages of his younger kids so I don't really know how that plays out, but it would mean that he'd be at least 60.

I'd also note that his wife opted to stay home to raise the five.

In our conversation, he mentioned age 55, but that's not realistic in his case at all  Be that as it may, it turns out to be the case that at age 55, or maybe 55.5, a person can start drawing on their 401K in some fashion.

Now, this isn't retirement advice as I haven't studied this and I don't know what the parameters are, but I hit 55.5 over two years ago and that therefore was an interesting fact.  It was an interesting fact right up until it dawned on me, which was pretty quickly, that my long suffering spouse is a little over ten years younger than I am.

That's significant as when people look at retirement they ought to be looking at the burn rate of their retirement savings.  Will you have enough, that is, to last until you die? 

Nobody really knows when they're going to die, of course, but a person retiring at age 55 probably ought to expect to live at least to their point of life expectancy, if not longer, even though they very will might not.  It'd be the pits to burn through retirement by 65 and then be waiting for the Social Security check to arrive to buy groceries.  Of course, that may well mean that a person in that position may die by 57 and never have retired.  That may sound extreme but my father died at age 62 and he never retired.  For that matter, his father was in his 40s when he died, and my long lived mother's father was 58 when he died.  He was medically retired, however, at the time, not a pleasant situation either.

Anyhow, if you are happily figuring "hey, I'll have enough to retire at 55 if I plan on living until 80, when the last drop of my savings runs out", but your wife is 45. . . . , well perhaps you better rethink that.

And here's where the basic nature of the sexes comes back in.

At least in my generational cohort, a lot of women aren't as well educated as men, and their employment choices are therefore much more limited. They aren't absent, but they're limited.  My wife's a good example.  She has some post high school education, but not at the same level that I do.  

Now, lots of professional men I know have a wife that's also a member of the same profession. They probably met at school or work.  But here's where the difference comes back in again.  I've known a fare number of women who have dropped out of their professional employment in order to stay home with children.  I've known exactly one man, and only one, who has done the same.

Why is that?

Well, that's because its a feature of The Old Law.  It may be the case that society holds that men and women should each have equal employment, but in reality, biology makes this a different matter.  Men can father children, but they can't give birth to them, they aren't physically equipped to feed them when they are infants, and they aren't really emotionally equipped to nurture them when they are young.  They just aren't.  Women are.

Which is an application of biological reality and therefore, fine.

It also means, however that the iron law of male employment is always at work.  

Men have fewer options on employment than women, in existential terms.  Sure, by nature men can be roughnecks and by biology and temperament they're suited to be soldiers, which women are not, in my view.  But they can't just drop out of the work force and stay at home like their wives can.  They cannot.

They also at some point are not only pulling the freight, but for a lot of them are pulling it after they probably shouldn't be, as they have no choice.

Is that unfair?  Well, probably some people reading this, if anyone does, are assuming I'm endorsing unfairness.  Rather, what I'm doing is noting the way of the world.  We may deem it personally unfair in all sorts of ways, but that's the way of the world.  The fact that I have to wear glasses may strike me as unfair, or that the prior two generations of my male ancestors died young and diverted the agricultural directions of our family into the office, twice, may strike me as unfair. But universal fairness isn't part of the deal.

Basic biological reality, i.e., the difference between the sexes, isn't unfair, however.  It just is.  The fact that we ignore this to the extent that we do is because; 1) in an a period of unprecedented societal wealth we can get away with ignoring that to some extent, and 2) in the advance stage of the industrial revolution we live in, we've forced, for a bunch of reasons (many just societal) women into the work force full scale the way we did with men in the late 20th Century and 3) with really advanced technology and outsized industrial might, we haven't had to fight and evenly matched wars or quasi evenly matched wars since the end of the Vietnam War (which was evenly matched in part due to the competence of the NVA, and in part due to the fact that we also had to worry about full scale wars in Europe and South Korea, and elsewhere, the entire time).

So what of that?  Well, not much.  Just that the old existential laws are never far from the surface, no matter how much we might imagine that we're exempt from them.

Lamenting the change in the Christmas Season. . .?

I recently heard two podcasts by a fellow who was lamenting the passing of the traditional Christmas season.  I sort of like the particular podcast, but I'll admit that it tends to be a bit snarky in what I think is sort of an over snarky way.  And it also features an interview, normally, of the same fellow by the same captive interviewer, which makes the style a bit problematic as the interviewer, in that context, is a bit captive.

 Christmas Tree, Madison Square Garden, 1915.

Anyhow, the fellow's point was that we now have an American (largely Protestant) Christmas that starts well before the liturgical Christmas Season and concludes well before Christmas, and we've lost the traditional Christmas Season entirely.  He maintains that this is the result of an intentional effort by American politicians to boost the Christmas marketing season and that this goes back to the early 20th Century.  And in support of it, he twice cited the absence of a celebration of the Twelve Days of Christmas.

Hmmm. . . .

I don't know, but frankly, I doubt his point here.

This isn't to say that Christmas hasn't become hyper commercialized, but the commercial, i.e., the gift giving aspect of it, is hardly a new thing.  And it isn't entirely a bad one either.

Before we look at that, however, let's look at his point, to the extent he has one.

 

St. Mary's Cathedral, Cheyenne Wyoming.  The cathedral for the Catholic Diocese of Cheyenne.

Liturgically, the pre Christmas season is Advent.  The United States Council of Catholic Bishops defines advent this way:

Beginning the Church's liturgical year, Advent (from, "ad-venire" in Latin or "to come to") is the season encompassing the four Sundays (and weekdays) leading up to the celebration of Christmas.

The Advent season is a time of preparation that directs our hearts and minds to Christ’s second coming at the end of time and also to the anniversary of the Lord’s birth on Christmas. The final days of Advent, from December 17 to December 24, focus particularly on our preparation for the celebrations of the Nativity of our Lord (Christmas).

Advent devotions including the Advent wreath, remind us of the meaning of the season. Our Advent calendar above can help you fully enter in to the season with daily activity and prayer suggestions to prepare you spiritually for the birth of Jesus Christ.  More Advent resources are listed below.

The 1917 Catholic Encyclopedia, a valuable resource which is frequenlty made resort to by traditional minded Catholics and those who look towards Catholic tradition, holds:

According to present usage, Advent is a period beginning with the Sunday nearest to the feast of St. Andrew the Apostle and embracing four Sundays. The first Sunday may be as early as 27 November, and then Advent has twenty-eight days, or as late as 3 December, giving the season only twenty-one days.
With Advent the ecclesiastical year begins in the Western churches. During this time the faithful are admonished

• to prepare themselves worthily to celebrate the anniversary of the Lord's coming into the world as the incarnate God of love,
• thus to make their souls fitting abodes for the Redeemer coming in Holy Communion and through grace, and
• thereby to make themselves ready for His final coming as judge, at death and at the end of the world.

Symbolism

To attain this object the Church has arranged the Liturgy for this season. In the official prayer, the Breviary, she calls upon her ministers, in the Invitatory for Matins, to adore "the Lord the King that is to come", "the Lord already near", "Him Whose glory will be seen on the morrow". As Lessons for the first Nocturn she prescribes chapters from the prophet Isaias, who speaks in scathing terms of the ingratitude of the house of Israel, the chosen children who had forsaken and forgotten their Father; who tells of the Man of Sorrows stricken for the sins of His people; who describes accurately the passion and death of the coming Saviour and His final glory; who announces the gathering of the Gentiles to the Holy Hill. In the second Nocturn the Lessons on three Sundays are taken from the eighth homily of Pope St. Leo (440-461) on fasting and almsdeeds as a preparation for the advent of the Lord, and on one Sunday (the second) from St. Jerome's commentary on Isaiah 11:1, which text he interprets of the Blessed Virgin Mary as "the rod out of the root of Jesse". In the hymns of the season we find praise for the coming of Christ, the Creator of the universe, as Redeemer, combined with prayer to the coming judge of the world to protect us from the enemy. Similar ideas are expressed in the antiphons for the Magnificat on the last seven days before the Vigil of the Nativity. In them, the Church calls on the Divine Wisdom to teach us the way of prudence; on the Key of David to free us from bondage; on the Rising Sun to illuminate us sitting in darkness and the shadow of death, etc. In the Masses the intention of the Church is shown in the choice of the Epistles and Gospels. In the Epistle she exhorts the faithful that, since the Redeemer is nearer, they should cast aside the works of darkness and put on the armour of light; should walk honestly, as in the day, and put on the Lord Jesus Christ; she shows that the nations are called to praise the name of the Lord; she asks them to rejoice in the nearness of the Lord, so that the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, may keep their hearts and minds in Christ Jesus; she admonishes them not to pass judgment, for the Lord, when He comes, will manifest the secrets hidden in hearts. In the Gospels the Church speaks of the Lord coming in glory; of Him in, and through, Whom the prophecies are being fulfilled; of the Eternal walking in the midst of the Jews; of the voice in the desert, "Prepare ye the way of the Lord". The Church in her Liturgy takes us in spirit back to the time before the incarnation of the Son of God, as though it were really yet to take place. Cardinal Wiseman says:

We are not dryly exhorted to profit by that blessed event, but we are daily made to sigh with the Fathers of old, "Send down the dew, ye heavens, from above, and let the clouds rain the Just One: let the earth be opened, and bud forth the Redeemer." The Collects on three of the four Sundays of that season begin with the words, "Lord, raise up thy power and come" — as though we feared our iniquities would prevent His being born.

Duration and ritual

On every day of Advent the Office and Mass of the Sunday or Feria must be said, or at least a Commemoration must be made of them, no matter what grade of feast occurs. In the Divine Office the Te Deum, the joyful hymn of praise and thanksgiving, is omitted; in the Mass the Gloria in excelsis is not said. The Alleluia, however, is retained. During this time the solemnization of matrimony (Nuptial Mass and Benediction) cannot take place; which prohibition binds to the feast of Epiphany inclusively. The celebrant and sacred ministers use violet vestments. The deacon and subdeacon at Mass, in place of the dalmatics commonly used, wear folded chasubles. The subdeacon removes his during the reading of the Epistle, and the deacon exchanges his for another, or for a wider stole, worn over the left shoulder during the time between the singing of the Gospel and the Communion. An exception is made for the third Sunday (Gaudete Sunday), on which the vestments may be rose-coloured, or richer violet ones; the sacred ministers may on this Sunday wear dalmatics, which may also be used on the Vigil of the Nativity, even if it be the fourth Sunday of Advent. Pope Innocent III (1198-1216) states that black was the colour to be used during Advent, but violet had already come into use for this season at the end of the thirteenth century. Binterim says that there was also a law that pictures should be covered during Advent. Flowers and relics of Saints are not to be placed on the altars during the Office and Masses of this time, except on the third Sunday; and the same prohibition and exception exist in regard to the use of the organ. The popular idea that the four weeks of Advent symbolize the four thousand years of darkness in which the world was enveloped before the coming of Christ finds no confirmation in the Liturgy.

Historical origin

It cannot be determined with any degree of certainty when the celebration of Advent was first introduced into the Church. The preparation for the feast of the Nativity of Our Lord was not held before the feast itself existed, and of this we find no evidence before the end of the fourth century, when, according to Duchesne [Christian Worship (London, 1904), 260], it was celebrated throughout the whole Church, by some on 25 December, by others on 6 January. Of such a preparation we read in the Acts of a synod held at Saragossa in 380, whose fourth canon prescribes that from the seventeenth of December to the feast of the Epiphany no one should be permitted to absent himself from church. We have two homilies of St. Maximus, Bishop of Turin (415-466), entitled "In Adventu Domini", but he makes no reference to a special time. The title may be the addition of a copyist. There are some homilies extant, most likely of St. Caesarius, Bishop of Arles (502-542), in which we find mention of a preparation before the birthday of Christ; still, to judge from the context, no general law on the matter seems then to have been in existence. A synod held (581) at Mâcon, in Gaul, by its ninth canon orders that from the eleventh of November to the Nativity the Sacrifice be offered according to the Lenten rite on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday of the week. The Gelasian Sacramentary notes five Sundays for the season; these five were reduced to four by Pope St. Gregory VII (1073-85). The collection of homilies of St. Gregory the Great (590-604) begins with a sermon for the second Sunday of Advent. In 650 Advent was celebrated in Spain with five Sundays. Several synods had made laws about fasting to be observed during this time, some beginning with the eleventh of November, others the fifteenth, and others as early as the autumnal equinox. Other synods forbade the celebration of matrimony. In the Greek Church we find no documents for the observance of Advent earlier than the eighth century. St. Theodore the Studite (d. 826), who speaks of the feasts and fasts commonly celebrated by the Greeks, makes no mention of this season. In the eighth century we find it observed not as a liturgical celebration, but as a time of fast and abstinence, from 15 November to the Nativity, which, according to Goar, was later reduced to seven days. But a council of the Ruthenians (1720) ordered the fast according to the old rule from the fifteenth of November. This is the rule with at least some of the Greeks. Similarly, the Ambrosian and the Mozarabic Riterites have no special liturgy for Advent, but only the fast.

 

 Holy Transfiguration of  Christ Orthodox Cathedral, a Russian Orthodox cathedral in Denver Colorado.

Advent is most definitely observed in the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church.  It's also observed in observed in the Eastern Rite of the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches, which have traditionally  had a Lent like observance of Advent.  Regarding this, the Orthodox Church in America, branch of the Orthodox that had their origin with the Russian Orthodox Church, provides:

We fast before the Great Feast of the Nativity in order to prepare ourselves for the celebration of Our Lord’s birth. As in the case of Great Lent, the Nativity Fast is one of preparation, during which we focus on the coming of the Savior by fasting, prayer, and almsgiving.

By fasting, we “shift our focus” from ourselves to others, spending less time worrying about what to eat, when to eat, how much to eat, and so on in order to use our time in increased prayer and caring for the poor. We learn through fasting that we can gain control over things which we sometimes allow to control us—and for many people, food is a controlling factor. 

[We live in the only society in which an entire TV network is devoted to food!] While fasting from food, however, we are also challenged to fast from sin, from gossip, from jealousy, from anger, and from those other things which, while well within our control, we all too often allow to control us.

Just as we would refrain from eating a lot before going to an expensive restaurant for dinner—if we “ruin our appetite” we will enjoy the restaurant less—so too we fast before the Nativity in order to more fully feast and celebrate on the Nativity itself.

During the Nativity Fast, we are called upon to refrain from meat, dairy, fish, wine, and olive oil. At the same time, we are challenged, within this framework, to fast to the best of our ability, and to do so consistently. 

If we must modify the extent to which we fast within this framework, it is of course possible, but in every instance our fasting should be consistent and regular, for Christ does not see fasting as an option, but as a “must.”

In Matthew Christ says, “WHEN you fast, do not be like the hypocrites,” not “IF you fast” or “IF YOU CHOOSE to fast.”

Finally, it seems quite odd that in our society—a society in which people gladly and freely spend huge sums of money for diets, most of which recommend that one refrain from red meats and dairy products—fasting is not more widely embraced. How odd that a Jenny Craig consultant or diet guru or physician will tell us to refrain from eating meat or cheese or butter and we will gladly embrace—and pay large sums of money for—his or her advice, while when the Church offers the same advice [at “no cost”] we tend to balk, as if we were being asked to do the impossible.

Okay, you may not be seeing any of that, right?  So does that mean that Christmas as a Christian holiday has really fallen off and isn't property observed?  No, probably not.  The number of Orthodox in the United States isn't large (which doesn't mean its insignificant), and the Eastern Rite of the Catholic Church, in recognition of their small size, generally modify their Advent customs somewhat. The Catholic Church is large, but then again, Catholics do observe Advent. That many Protestants really don't isn't surprising, as their history with it is significantly different.

Indeed, the Puritans, often cited as an example of tor original founding Americans, banned Christmas in both the United States and England. That's right, they banned it. And that sort of thing is exactly what lead to the English Restoration in England, and the dim view that was held of them there that caused them to have to take refuge first in Holland and then in North America.  So, for people who hold the "war on Christmas" view of things, the original hostility to Christmas in this country goes back as far as the same group of people we cite as founding Thanksgiving here.

Of course, it was exactly this sort of thing that caused Cromwell to posthumously lose his head.

Anyhow, going on, the same commenter referenced the "Twelve Days of Christmas" more than once, noting that few even are aware that the Christmas season commences on Christmas itself and then runs for twelve days, assuming that it does.

In actuality,that reference is a bit complicated.  It is the case that Christmastide is a feature of most Christian denominations in some fashion, although it's also the case that probably very few average people are aware of that.

Not all Christian denominations calculate Christmastide the same way.  In the Catholic Church, which most Christians in the west look to for the liturgical year, the Christmas season is longer than twelve days, although not by much, and runs from Christmas to Epiphany.  Catholics do observe that on their liturgical calendar.  In the Eastern Church this is also true, but it isn't calculated in quite the same fashion on their liturgical calendar.  The Anglican and Lutheran churches use a strait twelve days from Christmas, with the twelfth day being called Twelfth Night. Their calculation relies on the Latin Rite liturgical calendar, but the custom dates to a calendar that was in use at the time of their separation.

And here's where things get complicated.  It was indeed the case that these twelve days were once festive in character, with the onset of Christmas having broken the fasting of Advent.  The observation of the Advent fast was itself more strict to some degree in the West than it currently is, where it isn't observed at all. Rather obviously, in the Eastern Church, it still is observed.  Adding to that, the twelve day festival in the dead of winter was no doubt heavily looked forward to by people in what would have been otherwise a dreary indoor seasons.  Note also that the twelve days incorporated New Years Day within it, which is a Holy Day of Obligation in the Eastern and the Latin Rites of the Catholic Church, so in terms of the liturgical year a season commencing on Christmas and ending on Epiphany makes a great deal of sense and it retains a bit of its festive nature even today.

What is missing, however, is a public ongoing celebration of the seasons, such as celebrated in the somewhat dreaded Christmas song, the Twelve Days of Christmas.  But that parties and whatnot occurred is in fact correct.  Indeed, the legendary concluding party in A Christmas Carol in which Fezziwig dances with his workers takes place on Twelth Night.

Fezziwig gets down at the Twelfth Night Party.

So all is lost, right?

Well, I don't know.

Frankly, I think the point has been pushed too far.

Indeed, the lamenting on how commercial Christmas has become is a modern Christmas tradition and hardly new to our age.  The great G. K. Chesterton, whom I genuinely admire, noted in the first half of the the last century:

The same sort of ironic injustice is applied to any old popular festival like Christmas. Moving step by step, in the majestic march of Progress, we have first vulgarised Christmas and then denounced it as vulgar. Christmas has become too commercial; so many of these thinkers would destroy the Christmas that has been spoiled, and preserve the commercialism that has spoiled it.

Sounds like a very modern commentary (although much of Chesterton's work has as disturbingly prophetic nature to it ).

Perhaps it seems to connected, however, as already by the early 20th Century the modern gift giving Christmas we are used to already existed.  And indeed, it did.

It's very clear that the practice of giving gifts on Christmas was well established well prior to 1900.  Probably the only real change in the past century isn't that, but rather the onset of a consumer culture has emphasized it, and that too goes back about a century.

 Shoppers checking out a Christmas display in 1915.

Consumerism has undoubtedly made ongoing inroads into Christmas.  Now many stores don't balance their books for the year until Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, which is called that as that's the day their accounts hopefully go into the "black" and out of the "red".  But that's being going on for awhile.

Granted.  It hasn't been going on to the same extent that it is now, and the ongoing relentless advance of consumeristic thought and behavior has impacted things.  But not just as to Christmas, but as to seemingly everything in western life.  As societies have become richer, and more accepting of consumer debt, this behavior has expanded everywhere in the west.

But that didn't lead to a demise in the society wide celebration of the Twelve Days of Christmas. That declined on its own.

And that it would decline in the US is not surprising.  In spite of the observation of the commenter, this would really have been a public observance in that fashion very early in the country's history, when it was mostly English.  The observation of Epiphany elsewhere amongst Europeans, and Middle Eastern Christians, would have been real, but of a different character.  And the fact that the United States was so early on home to a number of dissenting Protestant denominations would have at least made some inroads into what was basically an Anglican tradition.

And indeed, in the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church, the observations really continue on, but just not quite in the same fashion as imagined by a Twelve Days of Christmas, but then it never matched that description.

But, going back to the lack of twelve day long holiday, why additionally would that have occurred?  Well, we really have to accept that this is something that lasted no longer, in that form, than the early 19th Century.  And the disappearance of isn't too surprising.

First of all, once again, it's really an English holiday we're discussing.  And sort of rural English one at that.  By the early 19th Century that England was disappearing very rapidly in favor of the industrialized England that came on rapidly behind it. Even in Dicken's A Christmas Carol the change is manifestly noted, and in part the work laments that change. Scrooge can be seen not only a a miser, but the emblem of industrial England.  He wasn't celebrating a twelve day holiday and was limiting the time off of his employees to Christmas alone. Sound familiar?  Well, that's because that's largely what happened in industrial societies, with usually a single day or two around a major holiday, like Christmas, also included (Boxing Day remains a holiday in countries with large English influence).

And indeed, that was inevitable.  In a rural setting, a series of feasts lasting more than a week long is not difficult to create.  In an industrial setting, however, that's not the case.  Most modern urban workplaces can't idle for more than a few days before dire things begin to occur to them, no matter what they are.

And, as noted, in the United States this distinctly English spin on the season wasn't going to last.  As an Anglican observation, the mere presence right from the onset of competing denominations would impact that.  One of those traditions, Puritanism, was hostile to Christmas itself at its origin.  Once members of other faiths, such as Catholics, arrived, the nature of an English Anglican observation was going to diminish in any event.

 Family with their Christmas Tree, 1915.  The Christmas Tree is a German tradition, incorporated in the American holiday.  Presents can be seen near the tree.

None of that really means that the holiday has somehow become un-observed, however.  By late 19th Century it was already a holiday that varied by community, with elements of various cultures mixing their traditions.  The religious nature of the holiday, in spite of the sometimes declared belief that there's a "war on Christmas" continues on, even in a country that has some substantial non Christian populations.  Indeed, Christmas has been so pervasive that some observation of the season is generally acknowledged by some non Christians, if only in a muted secular fashion.

Yes, it does seem that the commercial nature of the season has expanded. But then the consumer nature of everything has.  That might have less to do with Christmas than we suppose, and more to do with a culture that's completely adopted a consumer mindset, which is a problem in its own right, but a distinct problem.

Anyhow, Merry Christmas. And enjoy Epiphany as well.