Image: Islamic women in Bethlehem"The fields where the shepherds watched their sheep are probably covered with Zionist ‘Homeland’ settlements. For the second year Yasser Arafat and his Arab Christian wife have been forbidden to attend the Christmas service at the place where Jesus was born. The small Christian minority like their Muslim Palestinian brethren are mourning their civilian dead."
_______________________________________
by Nalin Swaris
(February 03, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Christmas night TV was a treat from Santa I will not easily forget. The highlight of the evening was without a doubt dear Vasu in his very own Talk Show, called Vimarshana on Sirasa TV. His guests this time were three reverend gentlemen respectively, of the Roman Catholic, Buddhist and Islamic persuasions. Understandably, the men of religion were placed at a respectful distance from the firebrand Trotskyite of yore. A large overhead electronic showed close-up views of host and guest. Vasu displayed deferential reverence. The conversations were profound, edifying, lifting the heart from the material base to the spiritual superstructure. All very fitting and proper on a sacred night like Christmas. But even a fierce opponent of World Bank-IMF imposed privatization plans like Vasu, needs sponsors. So the religious dialogues were periodically interrupted by commercials plugging sundry Christmas goodies vended by national and multinational ‘haamputhas’, as Vasu likes to call them. But then this is a very ‘niviccha’, born again Vasu, nicely domesticated in the House of Maharajah, I thought.
I was settling down to meditate on the inspiring sentiments conveyed by Vasu’s Christmas night ‘vimarshana’ when Sirasa’s very next programme came crashing into my bhavana like an avalanche of Christmas snow. To the sound of jingling bells and roll of drums, viewers were invited to swing and enjoy the season’s biggest pop concert, with a sizzling cast of local stars and starlets over: "Bethlehem PURE" (pure, capitalized). Since Bethlehem, these days evokes other associations in my mind, I decided to watch, to understand and purify myself. ‘Pure’ in the Christian lexicon means ‘chaste’,’immaculate’. No polluting hanky panky, not even a bad thought.Good men trying hard to avoid being chased, are warned against inclinations to ogle sparsely clad Eves, to lift their eyes unto heaven and pray: ‘Lead us not into temptation’. Couldn’t be THAT purity, I thought, because every song and hymn on the programme was accompanied by bevies of hard to resist, scantily clad, gamboling, belly swirling, hip-rolling, bosom-bobbing, nautch girls. (Have you noticed that nowadays no male Sinhala vocalist can properly entertain us without these delightful creatures bursting on to the stage and gaily tripping around? My friendly advice? Don’t let the songs distract you).
But could Bethlehem PURE be the brand name of an exclusive spirit of the intoxicating sort, which Sirasa’s parent company may have imported duty free via the Norwegian Embassy for up market tipplers? Must ask Iqbal or do a vimarshana of my own, I resolved. I still couldn’t figure out which Bethlehem, the concert organizers had in mind. Certainly not the Bethlehem (‘House of God’), where Jesus was born. Much of the town has been reduced to rubble by Israeli canon fire; the Chapel of the Nativity is surrounded by Israeli tanks on the ready. The fields where the shepherds watched their sheep are probably covered with Zionist ‘Homeland’ settlements. For the second year Yasser Arafat and his Arab Christian wife have been forbidden to attend the Christmas service at the place where Jesus was born. The small Christian minority like their Muslim Palestinian brethren are mourning their civilian dead. A young Arab Christian mother, veiled just like Mary long ago, told a CNN reporter: "Last Christmas we prayed for peace, but since then I have lost two children. We are praying that peace will come next year at least". It says something of the way commerce and consumer affairs can dull awareness that clergy and laity can sing of an imagined Bethlehem with nary a thought for what is happening in the real Bethlehem today. How could they, when they seem oblivious of the fact there is a precarious cessation of war in their own country? The Bethlehem PURE extravaganza was broadcast live, I supposed, from the front porch of MTV studios.(The local, not multinational one, stupid). The opening number was a Sinhala lullaby to "Jesu bilinda", in waltz time. The crooner told the MC, that he had composed the song long ago for ‘pure’ entertainment but was gratified to note that it is now also sung as a hymn in church. As the band struck up and he began to sing, ‘there suddenly appeared on the roof of the car port, a host of apsaras’ dressed in immaculate white and started swaying to the lilt of the sacred melody. The apsara idea was intended, I presumed, to give local habitation to the original event. In theological terms it’s called ‘indigenisation’. The payodaras of these divine lovelies were covered by stunning hold your breath, halters - a single piece of gossamer cloth ingeniously wrapped around and tied at the back of the neck. A tantalizing view of midriff zone ending at very ‘ethnic’ hipsters - few yards of muslin-thin cloths tightly wrapped around the hips and tucked up loosely from the front and fastened at the back, enabling both free movement and accentuation of comely contours. As these delightful creatures swirled to the lilt of this ‘nattal vannama’, every now and then joining hands to do namaskara, I thought to myself: "Phew! What if these gorgeous devis appeared in the skies above the green in front of Parliament? Would not the shepherds of our nation, who mostly snooze in the House, snap awake, and rush to caressingly eye these celestial sirens and most willingly yield to their overtures of peace? I too snapped back from my musings to the Christmas concert. The lullaby ended and the apsaras disappeared. But to everyone’s delight, more earthy ones similarly clad, appeared below to swing to the ‘gayanna, natanna’ rhythms of songs and hymns. This went on for a goodly two hours or so. For the grand finale, all the artistes appeared together to sing a pot pourri of Christmas favourites, like ‘O Holy Night’, ‘Mary’s Boy Child’, (in Sinhala) ‘White Christams’ and ‘Jingle Bells’. Thereafter I suppose everyone took their money and went home or wherever.
Santa is nowadays called Father Christmas but if you are a swahasha type, ‘Nattal Seeya’. As St. Paul wrote, when you are a child, you think like a child, but when you come of age, you put away those childish things. However, it is always painful when the make believe world of childhood collapses as you begin to realize, among others, that Santa does not exist. You start reading the wrong books and get to know that Santa over the centuries has undergone several matamorphoses. The original Santa was St. Nicholas, a Roman Catholic Archbishop, who according to legend lived in the 4th century. He is the patron saint of Russia and of sundry others like scholars, virgins, sailors, and merchants. In the Middle Ages he was regarded by thieves as their patron saint as well. Probably because there was and is little different between merchant capitalists and thieves I suppose. He was the Archbishop of Myra, Lycia in Asia Minor. Turkey. The entire area is now Muslim and is called Turkey, but vulgarians, please, the custom of eating turkey for Christmas, is not Christian revenge for this usurpation. The Nicholas legend tells of his surreptitious gifts to the three daughters of a poor man. Unable to give find dowries for them he was about to abandon them to prostitution. But Nicholas saved them from a fate a little better than death. And that is how the custom of giving secret gifts on the Eve of Saint Nicholas, and later of Christmas, had begun. The Saint underwent transmigration when the Netherlands was still a part of the Holy Roman (Spanish) Empire and the conquisatadores were overruning the lands of heathens. The Dutch celebrate the feast of Sint Nikolaas on December 6th. It’s a great children’s feast, when Dutch kids await the arrival of Sinter Klaas, a mitred archbishop carrying a gilded, gem-studded shepherds’crook; a saintly prelate, with flowing white beard, wrapped in a purple cape, worn over a white lace dressing gown. The full works and pomps. Sint had been updated to fit the realities of the colonial period. The Dutch Sint arrives from Spain and usually lands at the old VOC harbour of Ijmuiden.
He is accompanied by a young black slave, called Zwarte Piet (Black Peter) lugging a large sack of goodies. Zwarte Piet is dressed in the garb of a European page (servant) boy. Piet is in fact a Dutch lad, made up to look like the stereotype ‘nigger’ slave of missionary period: thick red lips, thicket of kinky hair and large ear rings. The Dutch settler colonists took the feast to what was to become the US of A. The Zwarte Piet part went out of fashion after the abolition of slavery. Sinter Klaas soon became Santa Claus. Santa got hooked on the American way of life, and like the modern day clergy shed his clerical garb, switched to ‘secular’ attire and became Father Christmas a fat, prosperous looking jolly old man with a white beard, dressed in a red suit trimmed with white. For reasons unclear to me, he now comes not from Turkey or Spain but from the North Pole, driving a sleigh full of toys drawn through the snow by eight reindeer.
Nowadays every one wants to be politically correct. Why should Christmas jollies be personified by a grand patriarchal figure however benign? That’s why Jennifer Lopez got into the act. Did you see her latest smash hit video clip? She is clad in a red, teeny weeny itsy bitsy, body-stitched tunic with a plunging neckline so deep, it would make the baby want to cry. And a red micro skirt, which allows maximum revelation of her, err, ankle high snow boots. She is crashing through a supermarket with a trolley loaded with luxury goodies belting a song, which sounds something like I’ve oodles of money and am gonna spoil my baybay - the big baby, who seems to like supermarket after shave colognes.
This all goes to show that Santa can appear in various avatars divine and feline. Christmas being the festival of peace, our Peace Secretariat thought it must do something for the LTTE Peace Secretariat. Now Father Christmas goes sleighing from one nation state to nation state and no one ever charges him customs duty for the gifts he brings for children loving people. But how to find a Santa? Hey presto, think of him and he appears. Santa Jon Westborg Claus. Santa takes a bow and says: "Will do anything to help my friends even if it means by-passing Vienna". He wipes the Nordic mist from his specs, scratches his head and mutters: Much as I love the sovereign Tiger Woods, can’t send my reindeer there and this Austin Minor is too small. So they pile the electronic gismos in a large container, seal, gift wrap and stamp it: "With love from Oslo" and send it under proper escort, jingle, jingle, all the way up the A 9 to Eelam.
Now whenever the sinna pillai Velu wants a few more toys, all he has to do is to turn his sattelite dish North Polewards, wait till the bells jingle and say: "Santa it’s me, Prabha. Do you unscramble me, Jon-der"? "Loud and clear, O Bright as the Sun, Great One. What desireth Thou now"? "A small peace of equipment. Can you manage"?. A click of boots is heard as the receiver crackles back, "Jawol, meine Herr", to the strains of "Eelam, Eelam uber alles". In the Peace Secretariat Colombo everyone holds candles and sings; "Rule Sri Lanka, Sri Lanka rules the (air) waves. (but) Guardians angels sing this strain. Lankans never, never, never be such chumps again".
(February 03, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Christmas night TV was a treat from Santa I will not easily forget. The highlight of the evening was without a doubt dear Vasu in his very own Talk Show, called Vimarshana on Sirasa TV. His guests this time were three reverend gentlemen respectively, of the Roman Catholic, Buddhist and Islamic persuasions. Understandably, the men of religion were placed at a respectful distance from the firebrand Trotskyite of yore. A large overhead electronic showed close-up views of host and guest. Vasu displayed deferential reverence. The conversations were profound, edifying, lifting the heart from the material base to the spiritual superstructure. All very fitting and proper on a sacred night like Christmas. But even a fierce opponent of World Bank-IMF imposed privatization plans like Vasu, needs sponsors. So the religious dialogues were periodically interrupted by commercials plugging sundry Christmas goodies vended by national and multinational ‘haamputhas’, as Vasu likes to call them. But then this is a very ‘niviccha’, born again Vasu, nicely domesticated in the House of Maharajah, I thought.
I was settling down to meditate on the inspiring sentiments conveyed by Vasu’s Christmas night ‘vimarshana’ when Sirasa’s very next programme came crashing into my bhavana like an avalanche of Christmas snow. To the sound of jingling bells and roll of drums, viewers were invited to swing and enjoy the season’s biggest pop concert, with a sizzling cast of local stars and starlets over: "Bethlehem PURE" (pure, capitalized). Since Bethlehem, these days evokes other associations in my mind, I decided to watch, to understand and purify myself. ‘Pure’ in the Christian lexicon means ‘chaste’,’immaculate’. No polluting hanky panky, not even a bad thought.Good men trying hard to avoid being chased, are warned against inclinations to ogle sparsely clad Eves, to lift their eyes unto heaven and pray: ‘Lead us not into temptation’. Couldn’t be THAT purity, I thought, because every song and hymn on the programme was accompanied by bevies of hard to resist, scantily clad, gamboling, belly swirling, hip-rolling, bosom-bobbing, nautch girls. (Have you noticed that nowadays no male Sinhala vocalist can properly entertain us without these delightful creatures bursting on to the stage and gaily tripping around? My friendly advice? Don’t let the songs distract you).
But could Bethlehem PURE be the brand name of an exclusive spirit of the intoxicating sort, which Sirasa’s parent company may have imported duty free via the Norwegian Embassy for up market tipplers? Must ask Iqbal or do a vimarshana of my own, I resolved. I still couldn’t figure out which Bethlehem, the concert organizers had in mind. Certainly not the Bethlehem (‘House of God’), where Jesus was born. Much of the town has been reduced to rubble by Israeli canon fire; the Chapel of the Nativity is surrounded by Israeli tanks on the ready. The fields where the shepherds watched their sheep are probably covered with Zionist ‘Homeland’ settlements. For the second year Yasser Arafat and his Arab Christian wife have been forbidden to attend the Christmas service at the place where Jesus was born. The small Christian minority like their Muslim Palestinian brethren are mourning their civilian dead. A young Arab Christian mother, veiled just like Mary long ago, told a CNN reporter: "Last Christmas we prayed for peace, but since then I have lost two children. We are praying that peace will come next year at least". It says something of the way commerce and consumer affairs can dull awareness that clergy and laity can sing of an imagined Bethlehem with nary a thought for what is happening in the real Bethlehem today. How could they, when they seem oblivious of the fact there is a precarious cessation of war in their own country? The Bethlehem PURE extravaganza was broadcast live, I supposed, from the front porch of MTV studios.(The local, not multinational one, stupid). The opening number was a Sinhala lullaby to "Jesu bilinda", in waltz time. The crooner told the MC, that he had composed the song long ago for ‘pure’ entertainment but was gratified to note that it is now also sung as a hymn in church. As the band struck up and he began to sing, ‘there suddenly appeared on the roof of the car port, a host of apsaras’ dressed in immaculate white and started swaying to the lilt of the sacred melody. The apsara idea was intended, I presumed, to give local habitation to the original event. In theological terms it’s called ‘indigenisation’. The payodaras of these divine lovelies were covered by stunning hold your breath, halters - a single piece of gossamer cloth ingeniously wrapped around and tied at the back of the neck. A tantalizing view of midriff zone ending at very ‘ethnic’ hipsters - few yards of muslin-thin cloths tightly wrapped around the hips and tucked up loosely from the front and fastened at the back, enabling both free movement and accentuation of comely contours. As these delightful creatures swirled to the lilt of this ‘nattal vannama’, every now and then joining hands to do namaskara, I thought to myself: "Phew! What if these gorgeous devis appeared in the skies above the green in front of Parliament? Would not the shepherds of our nation, who mostly snooze in the House, snap awake, and rush to caressingly eye these celestial sirens and most willingly yield to their overtures of peace? I too snapped back from my musings to the Christmas concert. The lullaby ended and the apsaras disappeared. But to everyone’s delight, more earthy ones similarly clad, appeared below to swing to the ‘gayanna, natanna’ rhythms of songs and hymns. This went on for a goodly two hours or so. For the grand finale, all the artistes appeared together to sing a pot pourri of Christmas favourites, like ‘O Holy Night’, ‘Mary’s Boy Child’, (in Sinhala) ‘White Christams’ and ‘Jingle Bells’. Thereafter I suppose everyone took their money and went home or wherever.
Santa is nowadays called Father Christmas but if you are a swahasha type, ‘Nattal Seeya’. As St. Paul wrote, when you are a child, you think like a child, but when you come of age, you put away those childish things. However, it is always painful when the make believe world of childhood collapses as you begin to realize, among others, that Santa does not exist. You start reading the wrong books and get to know that Santa over the centuries has undergone several matamorphoses. The original Santa was St. Nicholas, a Roman Catholic Archbishop, who according to legend lived in the 4th century. He is the patron saint of Russia and of sundry others like scholars, virgins, sailors, and merchants. In the Middle Ages he was regarded by thieves as their patron saint as well. Probably because there was and is little different between merchant capitalists and thieves I suppose. He was the Archbishop of Myra, Lycia in Asia Minor. Turkey. The entire area is now Muslim and is called Turkey, but vulgarians, please, the custom of eating turkey for Christmas, is not Christian revenge for this usurpation. The Nicholas legend tells of his surreptitious gifts to the three daughters of a poor man. Unable to give find dowries for them he was about to abandon them to prostitution. But Nicholas saved them from a fate a little better than death. And that is how the custom of giving secret gifts on the Eve of Saint Nicholas, and later of Christmas, had begun. The Saint underwent transmigration when the Netherlands was still a part of the Holy Roman (Spanish) Empire and the conquisatadores were overruning the lands of heathens. The Dutch celebrate the feast of Sint Nikolaas on December 6th. It’s a great children’s feast, when Dutch kids await the arrival of Sinter Klaas, a mitred archbishop carrying a gilded, gem-studded shepherds’crook; a saintly prelate, with flowing white beard, wrapped in a purple cape, worn over a white lace dressing gown. The full works and pomps. Sint had been updated to fit the realities of the colonial period. The Dutch Sint arrives from Spain and usually lands at the old VOC harbour of Ijmuiden.
He is accompanied by a young black slave, called Zwarte Piet (Black Peter) lugging a large sack of goodies. Zwarte Piet is dressed in the garb of a European page (servant) boy. Piet is in fact a Dutch lad, made up to look like the stereotype ‘nigger’ slave of missionary period: thick red lips, thicket of kinky hair and large ear rings. The Dutch settler colonists took the feast to what was to become the US of A. The Zwarte Piet part went out of fashion after the abolition of slavery. Sinter Klaas soon became Santa Claus. Santa got hooked on the American way of life, and like the modern day clergy shed his clerical garb, switched to ‘secular’ attire and became Father Christmas a fat, prosperous looking jolly old man with a white beard, dressed in a red suit trimmed with white. For reasons unclear to me, he now comes not from Turkey or Spain but from the North Pole, driving a sleigh full of toys drawn through the snow by eight reindeer.
Nowadays every one wants to be politically correct. Why should Christmas jollies be personified by a grand patriarchal figure however benign? That’s why Jennifer Lopez got into the act. Did you see her latest smash hit video clip? She is clad in a red, teeny weeny itsy bitsy, body-stitched tunic with a plunging neckline so deep, it would make the baby want to cry. And a red micro skirt, which allows maximum revelation of her, err, ankle high snow boots. She is crashing through a supermarket with a trolley loaded with luxury goodies belting a song, which sounds something like I’ve oodles of money and am gonna spoil my baybay - the big baby, who seems to like supermarket after shave colognes.
This all goes to show that Santa can appear in various avatars divine and feline. Christmas being the festival of peace, our Peace Secretariat thought it must do something for the LTTE Peace Secretariat. Now Father Christmas goes sleighing from one nation state to nation state and no one ever charges him customs duty for the gifts he brings for children loving people. But how to find a Santa? Hey presto, think of him and he appears. Santa Jon Westborg Claus. Santa takes a bow and says: "Will do anything to help my friends even if it means by-passing Vienna". He wipes the Nordic mist from his specs, scratches his head and mutters: Much as I love the sovereign Tiger Woods, can’t send my reindeer there and this Austin Minor is too small. So they pile the electronic gismos in a large container, seal, gift wrap and stamp it: "With love from Oslo" and send it under proper escort, jingle, jingle, all the way up the A 9 to Eelam.
Now whenever the sinna pillai Velu wants a few more toys, all he has to do is to turn his sattelite dish North Polewards, wait till the bells jingle and say: "Santa it’s me, Prabha. Do you unscramble me, Jon-der"? "Loud and clear, O Bright as the Sun, Great One. What desireth Thou now"? "A small peace of equipment. Can you manage"?. A click of boots is heard as the receiver crackles back, "Jawol, meine Herr", to the strains of "Eelam, Eelam uber alles". In the Peace Secretariat Colombo everyone holds candles and sings; "Rule Sri Lanka, Sri Lanka rules the (air) waves. (but) Guardians angels sing this strain. Lankans never, never, never be such chumps again".
![](https://pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=http://www.srilankaguardian.org/2008/02/bethlehem-pure.html&media=https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhibmUau_s3ks3wHQ4Kvqoax613GRmTKn_j_AkusIQ66zGKlwrjg9yScB4GS-9_AbPM486Gshxx-N7PvfM5G1goMbsd1COOMJcvWfEUQLRNJrs9j875pmBGoCtJFn4vatzeRWuqfcpA5EM/s72-c/Mush.JPG&description=Image: Islamic women in Bethlehem "The fields where the shepherds watched their sheep are probably covered with Zionist ‘Homeland’ set...){kind=link}
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