There’s no doubt that Christmas is, for America, the most thoroughly celebrated holiday of the year. We close our schools for a couple of weeks. We spend an astounding amount of money on gifts that we wrap with elaborate paper and ribbons which we throw away. We spend time with family — joyously or sacrificially. We tell our children that eight flying deer and a heavy-set guy with a big bag of toys will land on our roofs, scrunch down our chimneys (even if we don’t have one). We convince these gullible children that this old guy will fill their stockings, which are way too small, with gifts way too large. He will do this for all the world’s children in one night. One of his deer has a red nose.
We travel — home mostly. We deck the halls with dead (or plastic) trees festooned with lights and glitzy, traditional baubles. We decorate cookies, hang lights around our rooflines, blow up giant rent-a-Santas, and hang rings of greenery on our front doors.
If a troop of Martians landed their drones (and this year they might) during this season they’d most certainly be confused. What’s with the red-suited guys in fake white beards ringing bells outside stores — why do people walk by and throw some coins in a pot? Even more weird is the man in a similar outfit sitting on a throne in the mall apparently fondling other people’s kids. Some of the kids cry, which is the first thing the ETs see that makes sense.
Should these spacemen do some research to figure out all this nonsense, they’d be even more muddled. What about any of this is connected to a baby born in a village just south of Jerusalem, 2,000 years ago? What’s with the accounts’ fixation on the young mother being a virgin? What about the guys on the camels? And for pity’s sake, what does this baby have to do with the pudgy guys in the red suits?
Well, no one ever said that mankind is reasonable. The best that can be said about an American Christmas is that it’s an equal-opportunity holiday. It comes in a myriad of different forms in the same span of time and in the same places which makes the traditions hard to separate into tidy file folders. Though the holiday purports to honor the birth of Jesus, the Christmas season was a time of merriment long before Christ took on human form, before Christianity materialized. It was the time of the winter solstice, a time of darkness and cold, a time that needed a reason for a party.
The Germans are credited with the first form of this winter celebration — decorating their homes with pine boughs. This was accompanied with partying — the wine was ready, the meat unspoiled, and there was little farm work to be done. Put a yule log in the fireplace, drink, feast, and sing songs. The days will, at last, be getting longer.
But what about the birth of Christ? We don’t really know when that happened — some sources say 1 B.C, some say 4 B.C. — either way, not on 0. The Bible doesn’t say; it does mention the leaders of the time — Caesar Augustus, Herod, Quirinius, so we have some historical references we can consult. It isn’t until Constantine in the third century that an official date for the Jesus Christmas is set.
https://pacificbible.edu in southern Oregon. She teaches writing, logic, and literature. She can be contacted at 1window45@gmail.com
Image: PickPik
Jesus Christ is King
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