The lights are brightly shining and we dance
and sing to sleigh-bell songs as we merrily decorate the Christmas
trees. Isn』t this the most typical and familiar holiday scene that we,
and the rest of the world, are involved in? The same parties to go to,
the same presents to give and receive, the same people to get together
with. Come to think of it, for what purpose?
In 「The
Lottery」, people of the village gather together for a ceremony held at
the same time every year in order to ensure an increase in the year』s
harvest. In that ceremony, a single person is chosen to be stoned to
death as a sacrifice in exchange for a better harvest. No one knows if
all the village people agree to this kind of doing, but most of them are
just blindly following the tradition with no questions asked. This
might seem cruel and unreasonable to us, but it may be perfectly normal
for a different society with apparently different cultural background.
In fact, we
ourselves are really not much better than the villagers in that story.
For generations, the holiday that』s celebrated worldwide has been
Christmas. But how many of us know the real meaning of Christmas
anymore? Of course, knowing that it is the birth of Jesus Christ that
we celebrate at Christmas is considered common sense now; still, people
tend to put aside that fact and create instead a 「manufactured」
Christmas image. The images of Christmas shopping, Santa Claus, flying
reindeers, elves, candy canes and ginger bread houses, take over the
original meaning and the spirit of consumption is now conditioning our
children more seriously generation after generation.
I』m not against the celebration of Christmas. I understand that time is
changing and sometimes a certain degree of change is inevitable. But
when it gets to a point where an age-old tradition has lost its original
meaning, there』s really no point in carrying it on. If we must, then we
must find a different path leading to the same destination. A new
creation is never a bad thing, as long as we don』t forget what we are
celebrating, and use that to bring forth the original Christmas spirit;
or else we are no better than those village people in that chilling
story.