The Australian: Irshad Manji: Praise for a secular Santa who delivers the goods [December 23, 2004]

WHEN I was growing up in Canada, Ho-Ho-Ho was a No-No-No - not because my parents deemed it so, but because I did. My defiance sprang from the Mennonite kid who incurred my second-grade teacher's wrath by refusing to make Christmas ornaments with the rest of our class. The moment she condemned him to stand in the hall, I felt my own rumblings of resistance.

A week later, I challenged my family's decision to put up a Christmas tree. The twinkle and tingle of tinsel made my sisters positively giddy. They laughed and decorated. I frowned and demonstrated. "We're supposed to be Muslims!" I protested to my mother.

"Santa is for everybody," she calmly assured me. Her assurance was a warning disguised in loving tones: Be a poop if you must, but you're not going to ruin this for us. That's what she thought. Early the next morning, when not a creature was stirring -- not even a mouse -- I snuck downstairs, plucked off most of the tree's plastic limbs, and dumped them in the backyard.

But my first foray into guerilla grinchism backfired. The tree found its way into the house again, my sisters got the unexpected pleasure of redecorating it, and I hibernated in my room on Christmas day, too humiliated to unwrap presents with everyone else.

I'd like to believe it's maturity that turned me around. Truth is, though, it's strategy as much as maturity: as a Muslim, I can claim religious immunity to the routine demands of Christmas while taking advantage of the occasion's small pleasures. I don't feel culturally compelled to buy expensive gifts -- or even cheap ones -- for people who get on my nerves most of the year. I needn't worry about catching a grimace on the face of someone who's just opened a bottle of cologne I spent hours hunting down. And I'm truly grateful for not having to endure December 24 mall angst.

Yet I appreciate that many of my friends choose to. Indulging in the rituals of Christmas, however exhausting, infuriating and impoverishing by turns, makes serious souls unusually human again. I love watching folks get excited the way they don't on any other holiday. "It's going to be a major pain getting out of the airport," a friend told me, "but it'll be my first Christmas with my new niece. I can't wait!" For some reason, I shared her goose bumps.

I love sipping non-alcoholic cider with my non-nieced-and-nephewed friends. Relaxed conversation in front of a crackling fire -- we'd never squeeze that combination out of each other were it not for Christmas Day, when every monument to profit-making has resolutely shut down.

Above all, I love the so-called "seasonal event" at the home of a Jewish friend, most of whose guests are agnostic about God but absolutely evangelical about eggnog. Thus the term "seasonal event". My mother, as usual, was right. A secular Santa really is for everyone.

To be sure, there are lingering "seasonal annoyances" that only a sufferer of the moral hangover from the 1960s -- or a non-Christian -- would gripe about. So here goes.

Christmas lights: Why bother? If the point is to remind me that it's the time of good cheer, something I'd know by glancing at my junk mail or flipping TV channels, then please cheer me up by not squandering electricity. In-your-face waste would have turned Jesus off. Let's think about doing the same to near-neon neighbourhoods this year. (And in case you're wondering why I'd care about Christ's reaction, he's an important prophet to faithful Muslims.)

Whatever the flashy, trashy emblems that have come to symbolise his birthday, you won't see me hurling portions of pre-fab trees through the window this year. Since my days as a guerilla grinch, I've learned that if multiculturalism means anything decent, then Christmas is open to all. I won't avoid observing because I feel uncomfortable; I'll observe the way I feel comfortable.

To those who celebrate religiously: Merry Christmas. To the rest, may our respective gods bless us, each and every one.

Irshad Manji lives in Toronto and is author of The Trouble with Islam: A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith (Random House, 2003).