By Sean Sullivan Lagniappe columnist

Well here we are in the waning days of this year’s Christmas 500 race and I trust you are keeping the pace set by pop culture and your peers, because the American economy depends on it.

If you are one of those people who worries about giving and receiving the perfect gift this Christmas, I have to ask you why? I want you to list the gifts you gave and received last year. Can’t do it can you? So why stress over something that will be forgotten by the B.C.S. Championship game? Just get gift recipients something that will weight down a gift box and be done with it.

As nauseatingly “greeting card” as this sounds it is true that the memories of time spent with family and friends seems to last much longer than the memories of what gift you received. After that beautiful sermon if you’re still fretting about your gift list, you can go ahead and cross me off it because “American Idol” mastermind Simon Fuller already has given me everything I wanted this year when he reunited the Spice Girls for their world tour! Think about the Spice Girls now even spicier – yes this could be the best Christmas ever!

For my part I was finished with my shopping in record time this year, courtesy of one late night with a bottle of red wine, my American Express card and some smokin’ deals on “Precious Moments” figurines on QVC. So the whole discussion is academic for me. The freedom from the pressure to run bother hither and yon buying friends and family last minute gifts they will forget by Easter has given me liberty to sit back and ponder Christmas, the best and the most American of Holidays.

On the surface that statement seems crazier than the love child of Andy Dick and Anne Heche would be. We all know that Christmas is celebrated by Christians worldwide and it isn’t a holiday celebrating anything specific to the good ol’ U.S.A. The date wasn’t even recognized as a federal holiday until almost a hundred years after our nation’s founding, but we’ve made it a most American holiday. The reason Christmas works is the reason our nation works, they both take the best from many disparate sources and combine them into a sum bigger and better than all its parts.

While the basis for Christian holiday is the celebration of the birth of Christ, that actual date has been debated by scholars and Dec. 25 is not a date given by the Bible for Christ’s birth, but a date dictated by the writings of a Third Century historian. The timing of Christmas has as much to do with pagan traditions as Christian ones.

The Romans, known for throwing pretty good parties, had a winter festival that involved gift giving and merriment and was celebrated in mid-to-late December. The draggin’ a tree in your house thing came from Germanic pagan tradition and their neighbors to the north in Scandinavia also had a late December festival filled with partying and the burning of the Yule log.

So you might want to strap on a horned helmet as you drag a tree into your house or put that big log on the fire on Christmas Eve. Even the image we have of Santa Claus was the product of an advertising campaign in the 1920s.

What I’m getting at here is that Christmas, other than the perennial powerhouse Arbor Day, is the strongest and most popular holiday in the Western world if not worldwide. The United States, even in the shadow of its enemies abroad and within, is still the strongest country in the world because of its inclusion of many traditions.

Just like the Christmas holiday, our founding fathers, while a bunch of white guys of mostly British extraction, gathered the material to build our country from the Greeks, the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons and the Native Americans and we are much better for it.

The reason for Christmas’ success comes from its inclusion of many traditions and then melding them into one stronger than its parts, just like our republic.

This Christmas season and hopefully year ‘round we should remind ourselves of that. Just because something or someone is different than our current tradition doesn’t mean they or it aren’t the components to better end result be that a nation or a Merry Christmas.

Sean Sullivan is Lagniappe lagniappe columnist. Contact him at ssullivan@lagniappemobile.com.

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