The cultures you hold so dearly and want to protect from outside (i.e. American, in this topic, Muslim, in Europe) influences are purely products of outside influences and adopting language patterns, tools, systems, artistic styles, traditions and customs from other cultures because if they weren't we'd still be praying to painted, carved stones that differ from valley to valley.
Of course you can resist and keep your culture "pure" but all you'd do with that is create a sort of time-bubble where you hold of your little folklore shows year after year. That's not how culture works historically, imo. That's how culture works in a museum. Which in itself is an invention of modern times.
The main difference is that cultures used to bleed into one-another from border to border. Town to town, tribe to tribe, country to country, cultural circle into cultural circle (e.g. mediterranean to barbarian, lol). Today they bleed into each-other internationally. Through television, Internet, commerce, immigration... What hasn't changed is that it happens.
Nothing wrong with Halloween, imo. Especially as it doesn't really replace anything as such, it mostly adds something (mostly American now).
Santa Claus is a little different, for one because he actually replaces something (e.g. your Holy Man or our Christkind), because he's purely a commercial fabrication and most of us still know that. It's just a bit of semi-interesting trivia for us now though and perhaps in a hundred years only a couple of historians will know anymore, because Santa Claus took over and it's legitimately part of our culture now. If people look back to the 20th/21st century in, say, 700 years, they'd see Santa Claus as an antiquated Christmas tradition people in the oldern days used before, I don't know, "Microsoft Sam" became the popular Christmas-presents-bringing-person.
Of course you can resist and keep your culture "pure" but all you'd do with that is create a sort of time-bubble where you hold of your little folklore shows year after year. That's not how culture works historically, imo. That's how culture works in a museum. Which in itself is an invention of modern times.
The main difference is that cultures used to bleed into one-another from border to border. Town to town, tribe to tribe, country to country, cultural circle into cultural circle (e.g. mediterranean to barbarian, lol). Today they bleed into each-other internationally. Through television, Internet, commerce, immigration... What hasn't changed is that it happens.
Nothing wrong with Halloween, imo. Especially as it doesn't really replace anything as such, it mostly adds something (mostly American now).
Santa Claus is a little different, for one because he actually replaces something (e.g. your Holy Man or our Christkind), because he's purely a commercial fabrication and most of us still know that. It's just a bit of semi-interesting trivia for us now though and perhaps in a hundred years only a couple of historians will know anymore, because Santa Claus took over and it's legitimately part of our culture now. If people look back to the 20th/21st century in, say, 700 years, they'd see Santa Claus as an antiquated Christmas tradition people in the oldern days used before, I don't know, "Microsoft Sam" became the popular Christmas-presents-bringing-person.
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