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Can Christians ever manage to reclaim Christmas as a holy day?
Results so far:
| No | 44% | 414 votes | Total: 944 votes | |
| Yes | 56% | 530 votes |
No
by Dave Simmons
Created on: July 31, 2008
Can Christians ever manage to reclaim Christmas as a Holy Day? Well, in the first place, technically they'd be re-reclaiming it, given they stole the holiday from Paganist beliefs in the first place, particularly Mithras worship. Mithras? Christmas? Noticing a similarity there?
There's absolutely no evidence that Jesus was born on December 25th, to be honest. The Bible itself says that Mary and Joseph were travelling to Bethlehem 'during the harvest time'. Now, I don't claim to be an expert on weather patterns and agriculture in the Middle East, but I think I can fairly confidently say they don't harvest their crops in late December. It's the Winter Solstice, folks, or as near as dammit as you'll get to within a few days.
Add to that, of course, that when Christianity was at one of its peaks in history (During the years of Cromwell in England), the majority of Christians in charge of the country didn't want anything to do with Christmas. It was one of several holidays banned under law for being too frivolous, along with activities such as singing anything other than hymns, dancing, sports, and (presumably) smiling or having any sort of fun whatsoever.
But I digress a little. Many Christians claim nowadays that the holiday is no longer theirs, that it's been diluted somehow, by either the increasing tolerance towards other belief systems in Western culture, or by the terrible crass commercialism of the modern world. I might add that you only tend to hear this criticism in the United States, and to a lesser degree, the United Kingdom. You don't hear the Germans complaining, or the Australians. Presumably they're too busy just enjoying the holiday to worry about it.
The commercialism first: Given that a market-driven, consumer oriented society is what people seem to want nowadays, it seems a little unreasonable to expect it to come grinding to a halt during one of the biggest celebrations of the year. Perhaps someone's been reading a little too much Dickens, but the whole western hemisphere isn't going to have some enormous epiphany during December and focus their efforts on charity, goodwill and Christian virtue. The whole economy is geared up towards a peak in spending and demand at this time of year, and I doubt it'd be beneficial to draw away from it.
And if there's a drift away from traditional Christian Christmas values and celebrations, well, it's not exactly happening just at Christmas, is it? To my mind, this is something of a perennial problem. If problem it be, but that's another discussion entirely.
Finally, you can't return to something you never had. This traditional view of Christmas being solely a Christian holiday is a little like Prince Charles' vision of a return to a pastoral, idyllic England; it never really existed in the first place. Nostalgia tends to block out the bad things that happened in the past, but it also tends to create wholesale wonderful things that never really took place. Hence, we all used to be able to leave our doors unlocked (because no-one stole anything, instead of there being nothing worth stealing, naturally), people were polite, never swore, and were chaste, and churches were packed to the gills every Christmas, and indeed every Sunday.
Sounds wonderful. Let me know when you discover this magical land, so that we can join in, then leave, and start worrying genuinely about returning to such a place.
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Yes
by John Noppen
Created on: July 11, 2009 Last Updated: July 13, 2009
The question, it seems to me, presumes that Christians have somehow "lost" Christmas to somebody or something, but for the life of me, I can't imagine to whom or to what Christmas could ever be lost. Christmas is an affair of the heart, a personal encounter with all the magic that surrounds the season . . . carols, tinsel, the North Pole, reindeer with blinking noses, snowfall, a fat guy in a red suit, snowmen who come to life at the pop of a hat, and packed shopping malls.
For a Christian, this personal encounter, this affair of the heart, takes on an added dimension. In addition to all the happy stuff just described, a Christian encounters the magic of a quiet field outside Bethlehem suddenly turned raucous by the celebrations of angels, of advent calendars, of manger scenes standing on snow-blanketed front lawns, of carols sung in Latin to all ye faithful, and in German on a silent night, of midnight masses, and of Luke's immortal story of a child who would someday save the world, but at the moment placed carefully in a manger, wrapped only in swaddling clothes.
How can any of this possibly be lost? How can a person redeemed by God misplace, or lose, the seasonal celebration of his Son's birth? Can a faith made possible only by such a birth be erased from the memory of anybody who has ever knelt in his or her own spiritual manger in grateful adulation of a God who opted to live with us so that someday we might live with him?
If there is indeed any such danger . . . if belief in Christmas is ever really lost . . . it will be because of Christians. The world can't do it; those who disdain the notion of a Creator God and a Son who redeems us can't do it; commercialism can't do it; Satan, if he exists, can't do it. The only people who can take Christmas away from Christians are other Christians, and they come in two flavors:
There are Christians among us who demand that Christmas not be celebrated. "Jesus wasn't born on December 25", they tell us, as if we didn't already know that. "Christmas is only a thinly-veiled celebration of Saturnalia", they pontificate to us, not understanding that the Church has baptized those celebrations with the transforming power of Christ's gospel. "There's nothing in the Bible that commands us to celebrate Christmas", they whine to us, paying no attention at all to the biblical record of angels celebrating their angelic rumps off. Angels are God's messengers; they do nothing other than what God commands them to do. They would not have celebrated two thousand years ago in the fields of Bethlehem had they not been under God's directive to do so, and I'll tell ya what, Bunky . . . if it's good enough for the angels, it's good enough for me.
This is a squinty-eyed proclamation of Christianity that has no meaningful purpose other than to glorify itself by striking a pseudo-theological pose in opposition to a two-thousand year tradition of Church dogma and practice. These folks are best left alone to mumble and bumble in the fever swamps of their own minds. Ignore them.
But there's another way Christians can lose Christmas all on their own. There are some among us who are so flummoxed by what they call "the commercialization of Christmas" that they leave no spiritual room for the "biblicalization" of that holy moment. They become so consumed with yelling, "Bah! Humbug!" to J C Penny, that they become, to all outward appearances, Scrooges themselves. If they are wished a happy holiday, (a derivative of "holy day", by the by) they scrunch up their pea-green faces into Seussian scowls, and start looking around for some hapless pooch on whom they can staple antlers.
A department store clerk who can't wish me a merry Christmas is no threat to the season. Ringing cash registers do not drown out Christmas song . . . "ka-ching" is no match for even the shortest carol, sung by the smallest child, in nothing more than a whisper. If the sign reads "X-mas" instead of "Christmas", tip your head a bit, look at the "X' from a slant, and remember in gratitude the Cross to which the child of Bethlehem would someday be nailed. If all the commercialism in shopping malls makes you grind your teeth, then don't shop them. The rest of us won't miss you.
Christmas joy, like personal salvation, cannot be taken, mislaid, or stolen from us against our wills. But we can, on our own accord, walk away from either, or both, of them. And, if we're really good at scrunching our faces every Christmastide and yapping about "commercialism", we can influence others to do the same. In the words of the old comic strip character, Pogo, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."
Merry Christmas, happy holidays, feliz navidad, happy Chanukah, may the force be with you, and remember the Alamo!
Learn more about this author, John Noppen.
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