Rawr. I’m actually too tired to blog, but I have blog news - mini shopping spree news!

Now, when I say shopping spree, I’m sure it’ll conjure visions of designer shoes and bags, expensive make up and electronics, but I don’t live the newest iPod lifestyle, so you’ll have to make due with Laota and my crappy, $93 dollar shopping spree for useful things we needed.

We got oodles. We’ve finally gotten our Brita filter pitcher, which we’ve been saving up for. If we’d have bought it at Pamida, like we planned and were saving up to do, we would have ended up paying $30 for the pitcher and $30 for 3 replacement filters. Instead we went to Amazon.com and, due partially to fact that I’ve signed up for a 1 month free trial of Amazon Prime, saved money right off the bat. $11 for the pitcher with 1 filter and $14.90 for the 4 replacements. No shipping, ended up spending only $26 on the whole kit and caboodle, which means we spent less than half of what we would have spent if we’d bought it in town. Yay us!

Our second major buy was a new rice cooker and veggie steamer from the Wolfgang Puck line that we bought for about $27 bucks, shipping and all. This was a big one, we’ve needed a new one for awhile to save time in packing bento, plus Solstice is coming up and it’ll cut down on meal prep time.

We also bought some hand dipped incense for our everyday rituals and also for the big holidays coming up, and some new tea lights for the burners and the shrines. We rounded our purchases out with a few new books on sale at Amazon and the newly released Square Pegs DVD boxset. Those were just unneeded purchases, I know, but all our bills are paid this month - I’ll be damned if we don’t buy a few things we want for once, lol.

ONE WOMAN’S STRUGGLE TO BAN CHRISTMAS

I’ve decided to wage war on Christmas, all by myself. I’m going to throw snowballs at Christmas trees, use the term “X-Mas” instead of Christmas just to tick Christians off, break the penis off of every baby jesus figure in a Nativity scene I come across and glue them onto a hat like Crocodile Dundee’s hat with all the Croc teeth on it ( to show my conquests, of course ), and I’m going to start saying, decorating and pushing the concept of saying “Happy Holidays” instead of Merry Christmas.

Why am I going to do this? Because, I’m part of the secret Pagan/Homosexual/Athiest/Jewish/Muslim/Terrorist Conspiracy Agenda Machine set up by Black People and Hungarians in the wake of the Cold War to tear Christian religion a new one.

We’ve got our hands in everything. We’ve set up an entirely Gay city somewhere in California at a secret location ( Hint: It rhymes with Sman Snanfisco ) and plan to re-plant Gays and Lesbians into every city in the United States so that Gay marriage can take over and destroy The Family Unit, which is our #1 greatest foe. We’ve terraformed the dark side of the Moon with a community of Communists and once every 3 years one of them gets on a rocket ship, comes back to earth and tries to sneak into America. We used to have them exclusively in Mexico, but if you’re going to build a wall, we figure we better be up higher so we can get over said wall with ease. We dress up Yeti like popular comedians and smuggle them in to The View just to tick off that one, psycho Christian chick. And, did you know that we’re actively trying to ban the use of Merry Christmas from all Wal-Mart stores in hopes of driving Christians to flee from them, screaming, only to find themselves locked inside the store! The hope is that this will incite such panic that the Christian God will also panic, assuming it’s almost Armageddon and that the Event alarm on his cell didn’t go off like he’d planned, and prematurely rapture away all the Christians back up into heaven and leave the earth for us to plunder and rape, so we can have orgies without Christians waggling their disapproving fingers at us. Of course, we’ll have to pick up and wash their clothes first - who wants to have an orgy on dirty Christian clothes?

Yes, this is all sarcasm - but what makes it funny is that, supposedly, there really *is* a war on Christmas perpetuated by people like me. Because I sit around all day thinking about Christmas, lol.

If this offends you, well that’s your problem, and if you get why this is funny then I feel sorry for you, because you likely have the same problem as I do.

The problem being that anyone who’s not Christian ultimately has fewer rights and freedoms than those who believe in Jesus Christ, and no matter what your views on the matter, stripping someone of their rights is wrong - the end! I shouldn’t have to hear Christians whine on and on about how we, by simply existing, have waged war on them. If you’re going to get it that wrong, you may as well throw Giants and Pixie Dust in there somewhere.

Generally, all we ( meaning those who aren’t Christian ) want is to have our freedoms just like everyone else in America. Nobody wants to be so far down the ladder that their holidays are meaningless to 80% of the country, but are forced to dawn Santa hats and wish Merry Christmas to people who hate them just to keep off said people’s radar.

From a comment I’d made on someone else’s article:

I find it weird that Christians are offended by this, because no one is saying ban Christmas - well, almost no one. Of course there are always the crazies who want to ban everything, but I’m getting off the point. The idea behind tweaking names ( Christmas to Holiday, Easter to Spring, Etc. ) is not to exclude or ban the religious significance, but to make America a more friendly, open and all-inclusive nation.

Think about it - Christmas, Yule, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Solstice - they all fall around the same time of year, and Yule, Christmas and Solstice along with other holidays fall within the same 3 day period. Why? Because they all basically celebrate the same day for the same reason, Christians have somehow moved Jesus birthday to this day, but the basic idea and a lot of the traditions are the same - and most Christian religious holidays have Pagan roots, Easter being one of those holidays.

I’m not saying this to deflate the significance of these holidays, of course they hold meaning for you, and they should! But they hold meaning for a lot of others, and you don’t see banks closing their doors for Beltane, so why are you complaining? You have to ask yourself why this upsets you so much? Does the idea of other beliefs that contradict yours threaten your beliefs or diminish them? Do you believe that there is no room in America for non-Christian beliefs unless the non-Christian keeps their mouths shut about them? Should we, as the minority, just ‘ignore’ it? Hope Christian bullying goes away? Why is it hard to believe that non-Christians deserve to be treated equally? Notice, they didn’t turn the Easter break into Eostre/Ostra break, did they?

No, instead of putting another religion in there, they decided to be a bit vague so that everyone could enjoy the break without feeling outcast. It’s not your religion that offends people, or it’s holidays, it’s the constant war waged on people who aren’t just like you that’s the problem - that’s why there’s such hostility towards Christianity from those of us who follow different paths. All most of us want is to be treated equally, but in America freedom is apparently only reserved for people who believe that a Jewish virgin gave birth to a Jewish baby who was really the Christian God in the flesh.