As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, in Iceland they buy each other books and on Christmas Eve they open the books and everyone sits around reading them.
My wife and I have decided to adopt the Icelandic tradition of buying each other books, and opening them on Christmas Eve. We then have a wonderful quiet read that evening.
We might buy each other small presents aside from the books, but nothing is expected or required.
Do you have something to back this up? That wasn't the feeling I had during the seven years I lived in Japan. There was something of a victim mentality, but it wasn't as militant as you are making out.
I am one of six (adult) children, and we have recognized that it is futile to think that we will ever all have Christmas Day together. Instead, we choose another day (this year it is today, December 27) to have our family gathering.
My son, who is an aspiring composer, can do this. It blows my mind, and makes me think of the scene in Amadeus where Salieri is reading the score and hearing it play in his head.
I was listening to a podcast that suggested the main reason the Nazis wanted to kill Jews is because they felt that the rise of Christianity, originating among the Jews, was what weakened the Roman Empire and caused it to crumble.
For their own empire, modeled along Roman lines, they didn't want the same thing to happen.
Doing a bit more research, it looks like the melody was created as a lullaby for her daughter. Obviously they repurposed it for this song, but kept in the mentions of Maya as a kind of Easter egg.
Also, shockingly, I found that Minnie died from breast cancer at the age of 31. What a loss of a superb talent.
In the Pulitzer prize-winning book "The Soul of a New Machine", Tracy Kidder writes about a microcode programmer having to deal with timing in nanoseconds. One day his desk was empty and there was a note on the monitor saying that he was going to live in a commune, and no longer deal with any duration shorter than a season.
It's very polarizing, as in some people love it and some people absolutely hate it, but Stephen Donaldson's "Thomas Covenant" books are among my favorite. Not so keen on the later volumes, but the first two trilogies are amazing.