Christmas Confusion and Contention

In the beginning, Christians were opposed to Christmas. Some of the earliest controversy erupted over whether Jesus’ birthday should be celebrated at all.

“As early as A.D. 245, the Church father Origen was proclaiming it heathenish to celebrate Christ’s birthdays if He were merely a temporal ruler when His spiritual nature should be the main concern. This view was echoed throughout the centuries, but found strong, widespread advocacy only with the rise of Protestantism. To these serious-minded, sober clerics, the celebration of Christmas flew in the face of all they believed. Drunken revelry on Christmas! The day was not even known to be the Christ’s birthday. It was merely an excuse to continue the customs of pagan Saturnalia” (Gerard and Patricia Del Re, p. 20).

Encyclopaedia Britannica adds: “The Fathers of the 2^nd and 3^rd centuries, such as Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Epiphanius, contended that Christmas was a copy of a pagan celebration” (15^th edition, Macropaedia, Vol. IV, p. 499, “Christianity”).

The decision to celebrate Christ’s birth on Dec. 25 was far from universally accepted. “Christians of Armenia and Syria accused Christians of Rome of sun worship for celebrating Christmas on December 25. . . Pope Leo the Great in the fifth century tried to remove certain practices at Christmas which he considered in no way different from sun worship” (Robert Myers, Cebrations: The Complete Book of American Holidays, 1972, p. 310).

Indeed, of all times of the year suggested as the birth of Christ, Dec. 25 could not have been the date (see “Why Jesus Christ Wasn’t Born on Dec. 25”).

“To the early Christians the idea of celebrating the birthday of a religious figure would have seemed at best peculiar, at worst blasphemous. Being born into this world was nothing to celebrate. What mattered was leaving this world and entering the next in a condition pleasing to God.

“When early Christians associated a feast day with a specific person, such as a bishop or martyr, it was usually the date of the person’s death. . . If you wanted to search the New Testament world for peoples who attaché significance to birthday, your search would quickly narrow to pagans. The Romans celebrated the birthdays of the Caesars, and most unchristian Mediterranean religions attached importance to the natal feasts of a pantheon of supernatural figures.

“If Jesus Christ was born in Bethlehem, and his purpose in coming was anything like what is supposed, then in celebrating his birthday each year Christians do violence, not honor, to his memory. For in celebrating a birthday at all, we sustain exactly the kind of tradition his coming is thought to have been designed to cast down” (Tom Flynn, The Trouble With Christmas, 1993, p. 42).

(taken from Holidays or Holy Days Does it Matter,p.6, 2006 reprint)

HOW CHRISTMAS GREW

Since the time I became aware of the Christmas season, I was always looking forward to the day I will receive gifts and feast on the bountiful food on the table. Few years back, I learned that celebrating Christmas in not at all a religious activity. I doubted it.

I will post in my succeeding entries articles that pointed why it is not a religious celebration at all. Don’t get me wrong, Im a Christian. But its up to us to believe what we think weigh more in our conscience. This may not be the true birth of Christ, what is most important is that there is indeed God who came to this sin-marred Earth through a virgin to save me and you from sure death because of love. God’s birth may not be known, what is reassuring is that he died for us so that we may live.


This first article shows what made Christmas merry, as how it is celebrated today, is not the celebration but the economic activities attributed to it.

In view of centuries of criticism of the commercialization of Christmas, it is interesting to note that the holiday’s secular, not its religious aspect, has been most responsible for its popularity. In the United States “retailers have to count on yuletide sales for up to 50 percent of their annual profits. The shopping season now pumps an estimated $37 billion into the nation’s economy- making the American Christmas larger than the gross national product of Ireland” (Jeffrey L. Sheller, U.S. News and World Report, “In Search of Christmas”, Dec. 23, 1996, p. 64).
The lure of profit has proven so strong that, since t he 1870s, merchants have vigorously promoted Christmas. Initially they even laid out their stores with more religious trappings, such as pipe organs, choirs and statues, than some churches could muster. Convinced of the economic impact of Christmas, Franklin Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving from November 30 to November 23 to add another week of shopping before Christmas (Sheller, p.62).

“What many historians find most fascinating about the reinvention of Christmas is that its commercialization, now so frequently denounced, is what spawned the transformation in the first place. The ‘commercial form’ associated with Christmas and other holidays, says Schmidt of Princeton [Lee Eric Schmidt, Consumer Rites, 1995), ’have become integral to their survival.’ The consumer culture ‘shapes our holidays’, Schmidt says, ‘by taking in diverse, local traditions and creating relatively common ones. To turn Christmas into a purely religious celebration now might cheer those who want to ‘take back Christmas’, he says. But such an observance ‘would lack the cultural resonance and impact of a holiday deeply rooted in the marketplace.”If Christmas came to that, adds Restad [Penne Restad, Christmas in America, 1995], we probably wouldn’t keep it as a society (Sheller, p.64)

(Holidays or Holy Days Does it Matter,p.6, 2006 reprint)