Christmas is celebrated to remember the birth of Jesus Christ, who Christians believe is the Son of God. The name 'Christmas' comes from the Mass of Christ (or Jesus). A Mass service (which is sometimes called Communion or Eucharist) is where Christians remember that Jesus died for us and then came back to life. The 'Christ-Mass' service was the only one that was allowed to take place after sunset (and before sunrise the next day), so people had it at Midnight! So we get the name Christ-Mass, shortened to Christmas.
As I noted last night, I don’t celebrate Christmas. 🎅 But I think celebrating Quinn the Eskimo is a good substitute to celebrating Christmas. Quinn the Eskimo is probably a fictional character, but so is baby Jesus, and many celebrate his fictional legacy. To say nothing if the consumerist version of Jesus, the modern day Santa Claus, as they decided a cute baby born in a hay feeder in a cow stall wasn’t cool enough to sell big screen color televisions to the suburbanite consumer. I don’t know if Santa is fiction or not but North Pole is melting from all that coal and oil that is being burned in massive power plants and billions of automobiles.
But I digress. Bob Dylan supposedly created Quinn the Eskimo after Andrew Quinn, the lead actor in the Savage Innocents. Quinn plays, Inuk, an Inuit accidentially kills a Christian Missionary who is not receptive to his gifts of food and women. Inuk is pursued by the Canadian Mounties for the killing, into the great northern wilderness, getting stranded and rescued by Inuk. Ultimately, the Mounties decide to not arrest Inuk, and leave the great white north as wild as it always, deciding to respect and leave the wilderness as it is. While the film got mixed reviews in 1961, it seems even more timely today with wilderness under attack by all sides, both the preservationists and developers, who think it should be controlled in their vision of the future, ignoring the wishes of the natives who want the land just to remain as it always was.
In Modern America, 60 years into the era of the atom bomb and facing the growing climate crisis and a falling apart of society, we should celebrate the savage, and the world that is disappearing before it’s gone. We should do more to protect unique culture, to get government off of people’s backs, respect differences in how people see the world. The world of today is quickly disappearing into the past, being pushed away by the bulldozer tearing down trees and flatting out farm fields and forest, and the crush consumer goods in the landfill. Savages – whether they are Native Americans, farmers, or rural people in isolated country — may be our best hope in a society that is more about television glamour and what is new and shiny. Old ways have served our country for generations, and many ways are more consistent with our natural world and more based on reality.
I think we should celebrate Quinn the Eskimo and the Great White North during this holiday season.
