Happy Holidays!

As I do each year, I take time off from blogging around Christmas. My break begins today: Aside from checking my blog's email occasionally and perhaps the odd tweet here and there, I'll mostly be away. I expect to be back here about January 5.

Before I leave, I'll post an excerpt from my favorite commentary on Christmas, "Christmas Should be More Commercial," by Leonard Peikoff:

Image by Roberto Nickson, via Unsplash, license.

All the best customs of Christmas, from carols to trees to spectacular decorations, have their root in pagan ideas and practices. These customs were greatly amplified by American culture, as the product of reason, science, business, worldliness, and egoism, i.e., the pursuit of happiness.

America's tragedy is that its intellectual leaders have typically tried to replace happiness with guilt by insisting that the spiritual meaning of Christmas is religion and self-sacrifice for Tiny Tim or his equivalent. But the spiritual must start with recognizing reality. Life requires reason, selfishness, capitalism; that is what Christmas should celebrate -- and really, underneath all the pretense, that is what it does celebrate. It is time to take the Christ out of Christmas, and turn the holiday into a guiltlessly egoistic, pro-reason, this-worldly, commercial celebration. [bold added]

I highly recommend reading the whole thing.

I hope you have a merry Christmas, and a prosperous, happy new year.

-- CAV