Starbucks hates Christmas and Jesus apparently.

Cienciano

One thing that's as predictable as the sun rising and setting is "christians" every year dying to pretend there's some sort of war against christmas by the "pc brigade".

Hotblack Desiato

Cienciano wrote: »

One thing that's as predictable as the sun rising and setting is "christians" every year dying to pretend there's some sort of war against christmas by the "pc brigade".

Rather appropriate, as the pattern of when the sun rises and sets is the reason we've had a midwinter festival for thousands of years in the first place.

Cultural imperialist christians complaining about supposed cultural imperialist non-christians really do not have a clue or a sense of irony.

Christians do not have some sort of veto which means that anyone else desiring a celebration in or around Dec 25 can't.

Here's to a great winterval/festivus/solstice/booze'n'nosh-up just because

frostyjacks

Custardpi wrote: »

Do you celebrate Halloween? As regards Christmas it's simply one in a long line of mid winter festivals going back probably to the dawn of mankind. You need something to cheer yourself up during rough spells, what better way to do it than a big party honouring whatever local deities you're into & pigging out on that portion of the harvest you were able to put aside earlier in the year. Christmas is currently what most people in Europe & America happen to call this. Who knows, maybe in a couple of hundred years it will have been replaced by something completely different (Hitchenstide anyone?).

Sure, I celebrate Halloween. But there's no contradiction there, I celebrate it for what it is. I don't pretend it has nothing to do with pre-Christian Ireland. What you're doing is celebrating a Christian festival in a Christian way and telling yourself it has nothing to do with Christianity. Delusional.

Penn

frostyjacks wrote: »

Sure, I celebrate Halloween. But there's no contradiction there, I celebrate it for what it is. I don't pretend it has nothing to do with pre-Christian Ireland. What you're doing is celebrating a Christian festival in a Christian way and telling yourself it has nothing to do with Christianity. Delusional.

Celebrating it in "a Christian way" would involve going to Mass, praying, and generally just remembering the birth of Jesus throughout the day.

How many of us here do you think does that?

Rather, we simply share presents, food and company with our families. Nothing to do with any religious aspect of Christmas.

Pherekydes

frostyjacks wrote: »

Sure, I celebrate Halloween. But there's no contradiction there, I celebrate it for what it is. I don't pretend it has nothing to do with pre-Christian Ireland. What you're doing is celebrating a Christian festival in a Christian way and telling yourself it has nothing to do with Christianity. Delusional.

In a Christian way? Ha. Who's delusional?

Midwinter was celebrated in this country long before Christianity arrived. It is essentially a festival of light and feasting.

Peregrinus

frostyjacks wrote: »

Sure, I celebrate Halloween. But there's no contradiction there, I celebrate it for what it is. I don't pretend it has nothing to do with pre-Christian Ireland. What you're doing is celebrating a Christian festival in a Christian way and telling yourself it has nothing to do with Christianity. Delusional.

I'm not sure that having a big party and eating too much is distinctively Christian behaviour. If that's how Custardpi celebrates on 25 December then it's a bit of a stretch to say that he is celebrating the festival "in a Christian way". If he goes to mass, says prayers, sings hymns or whatever then, fine, but there's no indication that he does any of those things. If all he does is stack on the calories, well, yes, Christians do that too, but as far as that goes both Custardpi and the Christians are simply continuing traditions established well before Christianity was ever thought of.

Which really brings out the ridiculous nature of this whole storm in a disposable cardboard cup. Here are a few images of the Starbucks' festive cups from years gone by. You can see elves, reindeers, Christmas trees, a moon, baubles, etc. Conspicuously lacking is anything remotely connected with the iconography of the nativity - the infant Jesus, the Virgin, angels, donkeys, oxen, shepherds, stables, wise men from the East. Nothing. Nada. Not a one. So Starbucks isn't ditching Christmas from it's cup. They never put it on in the first place. (And why would anyone expect them to?)

If you take Christianity seriously, Starbucks raises some significant issues. Depending on how you measure these things, coffee is arguably the most-traded commodity in the world. And that trade is full of deeply disturbing excesses - excess profits; excess agriculture; excess hardship for those who actually cultivate the plants. Starbucks is a big player in that trade. Plus, with respect to Starbuck's share of those excess profits, there are a few challenging questions to be asked about whether Starbucks' tax practices are entirely consistent with good corporate citizenship. And lets not mention the environmental consequences of selling coffee in disposable cups.

So, yeah, if you're a Christian a consideration of Starbucks can take you to some interesting and challenging places. But these Christians ignore all that and get worked up over the fact that they bought coffee in a cup that didn't have pictures of f*cking elves on it?

Give me a break. It's enough to make a man embrace atheism.*

[* almost]

Hotblack Desiato

Penn wrote: »

Celebrating it in "a Christian way" would involve going to Mass, praying, and generally just remembering the birth of Jesus throughout the day.

How many of us here do you think does that?

Rather, we simply share presents, food and company with our families. Nothing to do with any religious aspect of Christmas.

Same as most self-described catholics in Ireland, then

Second Toughest in_the Freshers

... So Starbucks isn't ditching Christmas from it's cup. They never put it on in the first place.

they are, though. And they had. Just it was a secular Christmas, but they seem to want to remove even that.

Peregrinus

Second Toughest in_the Freshers wrote: »

they are, though. And they had. Just it was a secular Christmas, but they seem to want to remove even that.

As Hotblack points out, it wasn't Christmas. It was winterval/festivus/solstice/booze'n'nosh-up just because.

If you call that "secular Christmas", they aren't removing it. They are replacing a seasonal design element - white elves and whatnot on a red background - with simpler, and arguably more distinctive, seasonal design element - just the colour red. (Starbuck's cups are normally white, with a green logo.) Red is firmly ensconced in American marketing inconography as The Christmas Colour.

Neither the old seasonal design nor the new one were distinctively Christian.

Cienciano

Penn wrote: »

Celebrating it in "a Christian way" would involve going to Mass, praying, and generally just remembering the birth of Jesus throughout the day.

How many of us here do you think does that?

Rather, we simply share presents, food and company with our families. Nothing to do with any religious aspect of Christmas.

The Christian part is the shít part. Think even the religious think that but can't admit it

Penn

Second Toughest in_the Freshers wrote: »

they are, though. And they had. Just it was a secular Christmas, but they seem to want to remove even that.

"Minimalist design" = "eradication of Christmas"

Second Toughest in_the Freshers

Happy Holidays, eh?

Penn

Second Toughest in_the Freshers wrote: »

Happy Holidays, eh?

Happy Christmas, Second Toughest in_the Freshers!

Absolam

I'm sticking with Merry Christmas. Sod this modernist Happy nonsense.

Pherekydes

Second Toughest in_the Freshers wrote: »

Happy Holidays, eh?

The Starbucks in Liffey Valley has a "Happy Christmas" sign on the front window.

It's puzzling. How could it be...

magicbastarder

exactly - it's not christmas yet!

Hotblack Desiato

Madness like. It's not even December, Joe.

Links234

http://imgur.com/YZkQEFS

:pac:

robindch

Links234 wrote: »

http://imgur.com/YZkQEFS

Last time I looked, there was small, medium and large - so just what the f*ck is a "venti"? And why is a "Tall" actually "Small"? I'm assuming there's some slick, hipster-compliant reason why that particular chain outlet has redefined language beyond any shred of meaning. And, no doubt, there are off-menu special offers for regulars.

Which reminds me of the rip-off alternate outlets - one of them last week asked me whether I wanted a "regular" or a "medium"? What the hell's that all about?

Anyhow, anybody going to Starbucks and moaning about the cup design is missing the point, spectacularly.

</rant>

The Randy Riverbeast

Its that time of year again, the why do atheists celebrate Christmas thing. Leave out the mass and instead do something you want to do. There you go, celebrating Christmas without the boring Christian stuff.

Custardpi

Venti = Twenty in Italian. Cup size is 20oz. Not sure why they use that as a name for it though as no self respecting Italian would drink the slop they serve as "coffee" in Starbucks.

Links234

robindch wrote: »

so just what the f*ck is a "venti"?

20 ounce, hence venti.

Now someone's surely gonna post the role models clip, so I'll get it over with.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0deaskGSuA

Hotblack Desiato

robindch wrote: »

</rant>

Getting close to "Man shakes fist at clouds" territory there :pac:

Custardpi wrote: »

Venti = Twenty in Italian. Cup size is 20oz. Not sure why they use that as a name for it though as no self respecting Italian would drink the slop they serve as "coffee" in Starbucks.

So an Italian still wouldn't have a clue what it is. WTF is a fluid ounce anyway? The Americans should really wake up to the metric system. Isn't it illegal to sell goods in imperial measures here?

Custardpi

I don't think so, I'm regularly able to purchase pints of beer & meat by the pound, didn't get the impression I was doing anything illegal.

Hotblack Desiato

Pints of beer are specifically exempted, and you can ask for a pound of meat if you want but the seller must display a price per kg and weigh it in kg.

A common scam which is presumably illegal is tile or carpet shops which give a price per sq yd, even though tiles come in boxes of 0.5sq m or whatever. A price per sq yd is about 10% less so it's a way of trying to fool the customer.

We were getting tiles a few years ago, the tiler came around and measured up in feet and inches and calculated how many sq yd that was, then converted that to sq m for us, then we went to the tile shop with all the prices in sq yd, so they had to convert sq m to sq yd to give us a price, and then we got the boxes of tiles which were some fraction of a sq m each :rolleyes:

meeeeh

Well that is because people still can't do metric here. I come across it every day at work.

That has nothing to do with how Starbucks sell their coffee though because proper coffee was never sold like that. It doesn't matter if the size of espresso is 0.3 or 0.5 (dl btw) or whatever as long as it's decent coffee. Once you start selling watery plonk then the size seems to matter to people.

As for holidays, they become whatever they are through the common use. Even non christian celebrations evolved from christian tradition (St Nicholas day as traditional day for gifts was moved to Christmas), celebrations of family... That doesn't suddenly make it religious but it has even less to do with celebrations of light or whatever it was that was there before.

Anyway the fact that people get worked up about what is on Starbucks cups just tells us that Starbucks customers are more concerned about form than taste. Which isn't some ground breaking discovery anyway.

Custardpi

Starbucks is basically coffee for people who don't like coffee. That's why the products they're most famous for are concoctions whose main aim is hiding the taste of the coffee behind fruity milkshake flavours.

magicbastarder

Custardpi wrote: »

I don't think so, I'm regularly able to purchase pints of beer & meat by the pound, didn't get the impression I was doing anything illegal.

maybe you think you've been buying pints, but you've *actually* been buying 568ml containers.
that's not a trivial observation though; you say you buy your meat by the pound, but what's the actual measurement on the label?

Peregrinus

Cienciano wrote: »

The Christian part is the shít part. Think even the religious think that but can't admit it

Starbucks? The **** part is not the design on the outside of the cup. It's the tepid brown fluid on the inside.

robindch

Hotblack Desiato wrote: »

Getting close to "Man shakes fist at clouds" territory there

Last week had its ups and downs