My Fellow Inebriates,
‘Tis the season for manger scenes. I haven’t posted one since last year, but a friendly spammer visited to tell me she’d seen one featuring liquor bottles. And get this—the whole thing was an ad for Liquorstore Bear. OMG!
I saw an ad for liquorstore bear for this Christmas season, I found it to be in very poor taste!! The ad had liquor bottles placed to create a nativity seen, including one in a manger to represent my Savior!! I found this to be extremely distasteful and offensive! There are just so many other things you could have done in order to advertise for this season! If you need help in your advertising department, feel free to contact me! I assure you I can do much better than that for any season! Extending you wishes for a very Merry Christmas, and of course, a Happy New Year!
I don’t run any ads, people. The enterprise just isn’t that large. But last year I did run the pic Teena is talking about.
I have no idea where this Liquor Nativity came from. Someone posted the pic to my Facebook wall. Anyone who wants to take credit, maybe you can talk to Teena (and she can sell you some advertising).
As heartening as it is to be pitched on advertising and chastened for blasphemy in the same missive, Teena’s objections to the Liquor Nativity seemed a little automatic and underexamined. And since I hadn’t drunk anything interesting to write about, I was happy to find myself with a topic.
What makes an alcohol nativity scene offensive as opposed to one made of clay, wood, plastic, or glass? What assumptions could Teena be bringing to the table (or stable)? Does the medium used to create the artwork carry connotations, and if so, are those connotations incompatible with piety?
The media in this case are bottles of Absolut, Jagermeister, Cutty Sark, Jack Daniel’s, etc. None of these products had been invented in the year 0, although Jesus Christ notably made wine from water at a wedding in Cana.
One of our neighbors’ lawns has a manger set-up with inflatable figures that glow in the dark. These undoubtedly were invented well after the year 0, and not until last century did blow-up figures develop their own arguably irreverent connotations. The neighbor’s display is okay, right? Or should I email him saying his lawn ornaments remind me of inflatable sex dolls? Or that I’m worried about the Lord being detached by vandals and punted around the yard?
As for other artistic media, if someone fashioned a nativity scene out of clay, and the clay turned out to be not clay but fecal matter, but you couldn’t tell…well—is the end product offensive?
Teena might well argue that intention is everything, but how can she know what the artist’s intention really is?
I’d venture that person who constructed the Liquor Nativity scene was probably not indifferent to religion. This was surely a person who wanted to make a statement about it. Can Teena be fully confident of what that statement was?
As I mentioned to her, if I ever encountered such a scene, it would quickly be short a wise man or a shepherd 😉
But seriously, being offended is a choice. It is Teena’s choice to be offended, especially since the offence depends upon assumptions about the artist’s intent as well as, puzzlingly, the notion that God condemns the consumption of alcohol. Has Teena even thought about what she objects to exactly?
I would have let her comment be, but she wasn’t just commenting on the manger; she was trying to sell me advertising. LBHQ is a live-and-let-live outfit, with room for all beliefs—but the over-punctuated gist of Teena’s note was to plug her own services, all the while objecting that her Savior was not being respected. Unless Teena believes there are multiple Saviors (do you think she believes that, MFI?), Teena believes those who do not embrace her Savior are not saved. That they will suffer everlasting hellfire. Maybe I should be offended by that.
I don’t expect to hear from Teena again; someone else will buy her advertising help and they can rap about religion to their hearts’ content. Being a bit of a furry asshole, though, I left her with a postscript:
All world cultures with access to grain and reasonably abundant water have made alcohol. That’s far more cultures than worship Jesus Christ.
Three hundred and sixty-four days a year you tell your kids not to approach strangers. You tell them not to take candy from strangers. And then on October 31 you send them out in the dark with a bag to do both.
And sometimes you realize your protective instincts were spot-on. For instance…
“Whoa,” my dad said when he pulled this booklet out of V’s bag. “I thought we just had to worry about razor blades.”
The image does seem a little hard-core for a five-year-old—especially one who hasn’t grown up with the Christian story. If, back in the day, my parents’ neighbors had bestowed such a tract on them instead of a Milky Way bar, they would have been surprised by its not being candy, but not by the imagery; Dad went to a nondenominational church where congregants saw crosses all the time, while Mum went to Catholic mass where she saw not only crosses but the crucified Jesus with clockwork regularity.
Not so the kids at LBHQ. While their exposure to Christian doctrines hasn’t been expressly curtailed, the family nevertheless does not attend church, does not pray, does not say grace, does not promise eternal salvation after death, does not threaten eternal punishment, and does not spookily assert that Granny is watching them from the sky. (They don’t even let me tell them about Fluffy.)
Some highly unChristian treatment from Miss P
What the kids are getting might be called, if you had to label it (and occasionally Mum is asked by a fellow parent to do so) a secular humanist upbringing. The kids are discouraged from pillaging, stealing, killing, torturing, raping, etc., but without any deity commanding it. Meanwhile they’re encouraged to share, to be kind, to have empathy, etc. So far it’s working; there’s no sign of psychopathy or collusion with Satan, although their empathy is limited to fellow humans and Cuddles the cat.
No big deal, we thought. Live and let live. Lots of our neighbors worship, and that’s fine. Fine, also, if we don’t, right?
No way, José. Certain parents won’t do playdates with us. Others will, but they’re uncomfortable having kids at their table who don’t pray before eating their apple slices, so they make a point of educating P and V about Jesus Christ. The parents who trick-or-treated alongside us were upset by a pumpkin with Freddy Kreuger’s face carved into it (“That’s wrong, that’s Satan”). But finding a crucifixion picture in the Halloween candy was a first for us, people.
Even couched in kid-friendly syntax, vicarious redemption is a complicated doctrine. Coming from Christian homes, my parents grew up trying to wrap their heads around it, and finally couldn’t. They will discuss it avidly, and they’ll happily talk about any and all religious teachings with the kids—just as they’ll happily explore history and literature from all cultures. Some things they feel the kids are too young for—“Ulysses,” for example, “Breaking Bad,” David Lynch movies, and the bible. They wouldn’t read Leviticus to the kids any more than they’d take them to see “The Dark Knight Rises.” It’s too scary. There’s too much context. There’s too much to analyze, and at ages 5 and 7, P and V don’t yet have the full toolbox for it. As those cognitive skills come into place, they’ll have their pick of three bibles in the house. If they wish.
Doesn’t it strike you that religion vis-à-vis childraising is…personal? It seemed downright gauche of our neighbor to anonymously slip some propaganda in with the Milk Duds. Maybe just a little over the line…
We receive plenty of tracts from various Christian organizations through our mail slot, and unless they contain graphically violent pictures, they end up splayed openly across the coffee table with the bills and pizza flyers. It’s not that we would have hidden a religious pamphlet from the kids (although we probably wouldn’t show them a picture of a guy nailed to a cross)—it’s just weird that someone felt compelled to place that literature among the kids’ treats, rather than entrust it to the parents or—you’d think—let the parents just do whatever they’re doing, religious or not.
Said my dad not for the first time, This is an odd demographic.
Sure, this is a very religious area. So in a very non-religious area would we expect to find a Planned Parenthood brochure in the treat bag? How about a pamphlet on evolution or stem-cell research or same-sex marriage?
How many of V and P’s classmates’ parents would be outraged to find this in a Halloween bag?
Embarrassingly for Langley, probably plenty.
We were on a roll now, thinking of unsuitable Halloween items. Condoms! Lube! Diet pills! How about (I suggested hopefully) some airline-size alcohol bottles?
Why not? When you start depositing religious propaganda in a child’s Halloween bag, you’re taking a political shot across the bow. You’re making a Trojan horse of an innocent little trick-or-treater for your personal ideology. You’re hijacking something childlike for your own adult agenda. And that is uncool.
Liquorstore Bear 