Q: Why do Baptists avoid premarital sex?

Regarding what I wrote earlier: "The Santa I knew looked a lot like the one illustrated by Coca-Cola. Not precisely, but nearly so."

We fully enjoyed secular traditions in our house. I never sensed any conflict or sidestepping around secular celebrations. Children are sensitive creatures, they know when parents have difficulty accommodating or reconciling something; if my parents had had issues with Santa or the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy or anything else, I'd have known it, yet those were real to me and still are in a visceral way that only childhood beliefs can be.

We didn't bake Jesus a birthday cake on Christmas or have a fall festival at church on Halloween. I'm sure my parents wouldn't have objected to those things, but they weren't needed to reinforce the meaning of Christmas or avert the sinister aspects of Halloween. Conscientious Christian parents of my generation did that in the same way they guided children in all things.

Alternatives to secular celebrations arise out of fear, and not the fear you might initially think - not the fear of the other as wrong, but a fear of losing our beliefs and practices in a quagmire of competing beliefs and practices, not the beliefs and practices themselves, but the time they consume and take away from what we consider the truth and center. The distinction between "The other is wrong" and "the other is interfering with me" is very real, but we often conflate the two.

Nevertheless, each generation adopts old ways in their own way. Sometimes it's a reverent attempt to refine, sometimes an irreverent one to change.

Christmas to me (aside from Jesus) is Bing Crosby, Percy Faith, Nat King Cole, and modern interpretations of the songs from that era, such as those by Toby Keith, Vince Gill and Mannheim Steamroller. (I'm not a big country music fan, but no genre does classic Christmas better.) Those songs were old when I was a child. I was introduced to them by a generation that was recalling their childhood, and I embraced them as my own, along with the TV images that the previous generation didn't have.

As much as I dislike holiday change, I know that each generation that modifies old ways doesn't realize what they are doing, they are just getting closer to the meaning of the season, polishing off a little patina to reveal the ever-never-changing magic underneath.

If you grow up with it, you know no different.

Oh, why do Baptists avoid premarital sex?
Answer: Because it can lead to dancing.