I'm personally sick and tired of neopagans trying to pull the whole 'it was our festival first then you took it away nyah nyah' thing.

I personally am one of those who suck the greasy doodah of the dark whatsit (as batty_ will attest) but ffs, folks, Christmas is all about the Christian story, and that's its magic and its meaning. I really don't want to hear any more guff about some generic pseudo-Frazerian archetypal 'divine child' of whom Christ was just one example. If people want to celebrate a date, fine, let them. But the Christians are celebrating an event that they believe happened, which I personally take to be a bit more significant than just celebrating the shortest day of the year - as if more than a handful of us have any kind of a pastoral existence any more, in which the midwinter point could be said to be relevant.

I have a tree in my living room and there are little wooden ANGELS and SHEPHERDS on it, not elves or crystals or dragons or feathery Celtic first-menstruation-commemorating dream catchers. That's the way it should be, in my view.

As an anthropology text put it:

"This 'origins' bias privileging the original over subsequent meanings also works in reverse: when religions like Christianity take over an older practise and 'Christianize' it (Christmas trees, for example), the modern tendency is to see this as the retention of paganism with a veneer of Christianity, rather than as a transformative process in which old and new ideas interact to create a new and meaningful ritual with ties to the past."

- Karen Jolly, Athlone History of Magic