We must put on our best clothing. Our children must be best behaved. We must attend some sort of religious service, even if our shadow wouldn’t darken the door to a religious function under any other circumstances, excepting that of the death of a family member. We must have the most perfectly chosen gifts wrapped in the most perfect way delivered at the culturally appropriate time before the holiday celebration. Forget that the gift went on a credit card. Forget that you spent $75 on the ingredients to make a pound cake that the recipients won’t like. Forget that it cost more than the gift inside the box to mail said present. Forget that you haven’t seen their children in years and have no idea what toys are trending on the opposite coast.
There are few, I would imagine, that would dispute this sort of celebration, no matter the holiday, takes an idea of ideology or theology and profanes it in the worst possible way. Recently, America has developed an attitude that appears to reject this sort of celebration, with cries of “Christmas already?!?” heard in the aisles of Target as the various artificial trees go on display in the days before the celebration of Halloween.
The idea of Christmas as a sacred holiday seems to have become profaned by both the commercialism that we all buy into (even those who regard Christmas as a religious holiday) and the embracing of Christmas as a secular holiday celebrated outside of a religious context. Both of these adaptations of Christmas are denigrated in the minds of those who wish it to remain about the birth of Jesus. But in order for Christmas to “remain” about the birth of Jesus, it has to have been about the birth of Jesus in the first place. And this is simply not the case. Biblical scholars have identified, based on textual clues in the Bible, that Jesus was probably born in the fall or spring. (He wasn’t born in the year “zero” either, but that’s a different story.) Like Easter, December 25 was a pagan holiday that celebrated a reversal of class situations (Saturnalia) in which masters became slaves and slaves became masters for the day. This was an apt choice by early Christian leaders, as Jesus—a simple carpenter—came as a sort of “unking.”
So at its very heart, the only claim that Christians have on December 25 is the renaming of an existing holiday that remotely suggests a correlation to Jesus. December 25, of course, was further strengthened by the celebration of Hanukah by those who practiced Judaism (again, another long side story). But the religious right (or traditionalists) try to assert that Christmas had a stronghold on this time of the year and is the only appropriate holiday that deserves observation. “Keep the Christ in Christmas” and “Jesus is the reason for the season” are two obvious recent examples of that sort of thinking. Yet to claim a season devoted to thousands-years-old celebrations as reserved for only a certain type of celebration is, simply, wrong.
The “tradition” of Christmas that both the sacred and secular share is the giving of gifts. This is actually the only part of Christmas that can be related to the birth of Jesus. Three wise men from the east came to bring gifts that they presented to Jesus. But the nature of those gifts, while holding real material value, were symbolic and held prediction of the future. The gifts we give today are anything but symbolic. At least they aren’t overtly. I do recall a time when my sister and I were shopping for a Christmas gift for my mother. “Let’s get her a wool sweater,” I suggested. “And tell her ‘we wanted to give you something as irritating as you are.’” However, the gifts most people exchange today rarely serve in a symbolic way.
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