Are You Worried About The Christ In Christmas?

Today on my Facebook page, a friend of a friend posted a rant about taking the Christ out of Christmas.  It made me see red, not Christmas red, angry red.  The "taking the Christ out of Christmas" concept was pushed and still is to my knowledge by Fox "News."  This began a few years ago, and I see it hasn't died the death it deserves yet.  I did not want to block my friend, and Facebook wouldn't let me delete the post, so I stuck to the original poster.  I posted the following response on my page.

FACT: Not all religions celebrate December 25 as Christmas.

FACT: The term "Happy Holidays" has been used for years and years and years. (There is even a song Happy Holidays)

If you are one of those folks that froth at the mouth because someone says Happy Holidays, your good Christian upbringing and nature should guide you to be tolerant. Nobody is taking Christ out of Christmas for those who celebrate it. YOU might be taking it out a little by believing that you have to spend a small fortune on gifts and food. YOU might be watering down the "season of joy" by being rude to sales personnel, fighting over a parking space, road rage, lack of tolerance, and other lovely "unChristly" actions.  It prompted me to write about how I found the meaning of Christmas.

The best Christmas I ever had was in 1967. I went to my boyfriend's house on Christmas day. His neighbor was a very high ranking Marine at Quantico. He brought 2 young Marines from Bethesda Naval Hospital to the celebration. They were just a couple of years older than me. They were undergoing treatment for wounds received in combat in Vietnam. One had been burned horribly bad. Every part of his exposed skin was hideous. The other one had traumatic brain injuries and lost a leg and an arm. They had no family close enough to spend Christmas with, so the Colonel would select seriously wounded Marines to accompany him to his Christmas celebration.   He did this every year.

When the young men were brought into the home and introduced to everyone, they received a warm welcome.  Looking back on it, I hope that my face didn't reflect how horrified I was at their appearance; I actually went into a bedroom and cried for them. How could this happen to these young men, boys actually?  How could life be so unfair?  It made my heart ache for them.

When I regained my composure, I returned to the festivities. They ate like it was their last meal. After dinner, everyone went into the living room, where they talked about everything. They were given a couple of gifts by the neighbor. They got very choked up from the kindness of a rather gruff man. They both said it was the best Christmas they ever had.  They appreciated every kindness given to them, every morsel of food, every laugh, and the small gifts they were given to them were more than they ever expected. 

I learned a lot that day and have never been the same. Christmas is not about gifts or food, or religion. It's about the kindness and love, and caring that you carry in yourself. Wouldn't it be nice if we all knew that? So if someone wishes you a Happy Holiday, CAN'T YOU BE A BIG ENOUGH PERSON TO JUST SMILE AND SAY "SAME TO YOU" without you getting your panties in a wad?

In my anger, I searched for the history of Christmas history, not the fabricated one.  I found this great explanation that describes the background of the thing we have twisted into a spiritual fairy tale.  We have taken the negatives from a horrible period of time and turned them into an epic Disney world of wonder.  Before you get your hackles up, read it.  You can see where we adapted the gluttony of pigging out on food, the Christmas Tree and giving gifts as a celebration of what somebody changed from the historical versions to fit nicely into a celebration of the birth of Jesus.  It is an interesting read.

 How Did Christmas Come to Be Celebrated on December 25?

A. Roman pagans first introduced Saturnalia's holiday, a week-long period of lawlessness celebrated between December 17-25. Roman courts were closed during this period, and Roman law dictated that no one could be punished for damaging property or injuring people during the weeklong celebration. The festival began when Roman authorities chose “an enemy of the Roman people” to represent the “Lord of Misrule.” Each Roman community selected a victim whom they forced to indulge in food and other physical pleasures throughout the week. At the festival’s conclusion, December 25th, Roman authorities believed they were destroying the forces of darkness by brutally murdering this innocent man or woman.
B. The ancient Greek writer poet and historian Lucian (in his dialogue entitled Saturnalia) describes the festival’s observance in his time. He mentions these customs in addition to human sacrifice: widespread intoxication; going from house to house while singing naked; rape and other sexual licenses; and consuming human-shaped biscuits (still produced in some English and most German bakeries during the Christmas season).
C. In the 4th century CE, Christianity imported the Saturnalia festival, hoping to take the pagan masses. Christian leaders succeeded in converting to Christianity large numbers of pagans by promising them to continue to celebrate the Saturnalia as Christians.[2]
D. The problem was that there was nothing intrinsically Christian about Saturnalia. These Christian leaders named Saturnalia’s concluding day, December 25th, to be Jesus’ birthday to remedy this.
E. Christians had little success, however, refining the practices of Saturnalia. As Stephen Nissenbaum, professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, writes, “In return for ensuring massive observance of the anniversary of the Savior’s birth by assigning it to this resonant date, the Church for its part tacitly agreed to allow the holiday to be celebrated more or less the way it had always been.” The earliest Christmas holidays were celebrated by drinking, sexual indulgence, singing naked in the streets (a precursor of modern caroling), etc.
F. The Reverend Increase Mather of Boston observed in 1687 that “the early Christians who first observed the Nativity on December 25 did not do so thinking that Christ was born in that month, but because the Heathens’ Saturnalia was at that time kept in Rome, and they were willing to have those Pagan Holidays metamorphosed into Christian ones.”[3] Because of its known pagan origin, Christmas was banned by the Puritans, and its observance was illegal in Massachusetts between 1659 and 1681.[4] However, Christmas was and still is celebrated by most Christians.
G. Some of the most depraved customs of the Saturnalia carnival were intentionally revived by the Catholic Church in 1466 when Pope Paul II, for the amusement of his Roman citizens, forced Jews to race naked through the streets of the city. An eyewitness account reports, “Before they were to run, the Jews were richly fed, to make the race more difficult for them and at the same time more amusing for spectators. They ran… amid Rome’s taunting shrieks and peals of laughter, while the Holy Father stood upon a richly ornamented balcony and laughed heartily.”[5]
H. As part of the Saturnalia carnival throughout the 18th and 19th centuries CE, rabbis of the ghetto in Rome were forced to wear clownish outfits and march through the city streets to the jeers of the crowd, pelted by a variety of missiles. When the Jewish community of Rome sent a petition in1836 to Pope Gregory XVI begging him to stop the Jewish community's annual Saturnalia abuse, he responded, “It is not opportune to make any innovation.”[6] On December 25, 1881, Christian leaders whipped the Polish masses into Antisemitic frenzies that led to riots across the country. In Warsaw, 12 Jews were brutally murdered, huge numbers were maimed, and many Jewish women were raped. Two million rubles worth of property was destroyed.

 The Origins of Christmas Customs

A. The Origin of Christmas Tree
Just as early Christians recruited Roman pagans by associating Christmas with the Saturnalia, so too worshippers of the Asheira cult and its offshoots were recruited by the Church sanctioning “Christmas Trees.”[7] Pagans had long worshiped trees in the forest or brought them into their homes and decorated them, and this observance was adopted and painted with a Christian veneer by the Church.
B. The Origin of Mistletoe
Norse mythology recounts how the god Balder was killed using a mistletoe arrow by his rival god Hoder while fighting for the female Nanna. Druid rituals use mistletoe to poison their human sacrificial victim.[8] The Christian custom of “kissing under the mistletoe” is a later synthesis of Saturnalia's sexual license with the Druidic sacrificial cult.[9]
C. The Origin of Christmas Presents
In pre-Christian Rome, the emperors compelled their most despised citizens to bring offerings and gifts during the Saturnalia (in December) and Kalends (in January). Later, this ritual expanded to include gift-giving among the general populace. The Catholic Church gave this custom a Christian flavor by re-rooting it in the supposed gift-giving of Saint Nicholas (see below).[10]
D. The Origin of Santa Claus
a. Nicholas was born in Parara, Turkey, in 270 CE and later became Bishop of Myra. He died in 345 CE on December 6th. He was only named a saint in the 19th century.
b. Nicholas was among the most senior bishops who convened the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE and created the New Testament. The text they produced portrayed Jews as “the children of the devil”[11] who sentenced Jesus to death.
c. In 1087, a group of sailors who idolized Nicholas moved his bones from Turkey to a sanctuary in Bari, Italy. There Nicholas supplanted a female boon-giving deity called The Grandmother, or Pasqua Epiphania, who used to fill the children's stockings with her gifts. The Grandmother was ousted from her shrine at Bari, which became the center of the Nicholas cult. Members of this group gave each other gifts during a pageant they conducted annually on Nicholas’ death, December 6.
d. The Nicholas cult spread north until it was adopted by German and Celtic pagans. These groups worshiped a pantheon led by Woden –their chief god and the father of Thor, Balder, and Tiw. Woden had a long, white beard and rode a horse through the heavens one evening each Autumn. When Nicholas merged with Woden, he shed his Mediterranean appearance, grew a beard, mounted a flying horse, rescheduled his flight for December, and donned heavy winter clothing.
e. In a bid for pagan adherents in Northern Europe, the Catholic Church adopted the Nicholas cult and taught that he did (and they should) distribute gifts on December 25th instead of December 6th.
f. In 1809, the novelist Washington Irving (most famous for his The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle) wrote a satire of Dutch culture entitled Knickerbocker History. The satire refers several times to the white-bearded, flying-horse riding Saint Nicholas using his Dutch name, Santa Claus.
g. Dr. Clement Moore, a professor at Union Seminary, read Knickerbocker History, and in 1822 he published a poem based on the character Santa Claus: “Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, in the hope that Saint Nicholas soon would be there…” Moore innovated by portraying a Santa with eight reindeer who descended through chimneys.
h. The Bavarian illustrator Thomas Nast almost completed the modern picture of Santa Claus. From 1862 through 1886, based on Moore’s poem, Nast drew more than 2,200 cartoon images of Santa for Harper’s Weekly. Before Nast, Saint Nicholas had been pictured as everything from a stern looking bishop to a gnome-like figure in a frock. Nast also gave Santa a home at the North Pole, his workshop filled with elves, and his list of the world's good and bad children. All Santa was missing was his red outfit.
i. In 1931, the Coca-Cola Corporation contracted the Swedish commercial artist Haddon Sundblom to create a coke-drinking Santa. Sundblom modeled his Santa on his friend Lou Prentice, chosen for his cheerful, chubby face. The corporation insisted that Santa’s fur-trimmed suit be bright, Coca-Cola red. And Santa was born – a blend of Christian crusader, pagan god, and commercial idol.

The Christmas Challenge

. Christmas has always been a holiday celebrated carelessly. For millennia, pagans, Christians, and even Jews have been swept away in the season’s festivities, and very few people ever pause to consider the celebration’s intrinsic meaning, history, or origins.

· Christmas celebrates the Christian God's birth who came to rescue mankind from the “curse of the Torah.” It is a 24-hour declaration that Judaism is no longer valid.

· Christmas is a lie. There is no Christian church with a tradition that Jesus was really born on December 25th.

· December 25 is a day on which Jews have been shamed, tortured, and murdered.

· Many of the most popular Christmas customs – including Christmas trees, mistletoe, Christmas presents, and Santa Claus – are modern incarnations of the most depraved pagan rituals ever practiced on earth.

Many excitedly preparing for their Christmas celebrations would prefer not to know about the holiday’s real significance. If they do know the history, they often object that their celebration has nothing to do with the holiday’s monstrous history and meaning. “We are just having fun.”
Imagine that between 1933-45, the Nazi regime celebrated Adolf Hitler’s birthday – April 20 – as a holiday. Imagine that they named the day “Hitlerday” and observed the day with feasting, drunkenness, gift-giving, and various pagan practices. Imagine that Jews were historically subject to perverse tortures and abuse on that day and that this continued for centuries.
Now, imagine that your great-great-great-grandchildren were about to celebrate Hitlerday. April 20th arrived. They had long forgotten about Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. They had never heard of gas chambers or death marches. They had purchased champagne and caviar and were about to begin the party when someone reminded them of the day’s real history and their ancestors’ agony. Imagine that they initially objected, “We aren’t celebrating the Holocaust; we’re just having a little Hitlerday party.” If you could travel forward in time and meet them if you could say a few words to them, what would you advise them to do on Hitlerday?
On December 25, 1941, Julius Streicher, one of the most vicious of Hitler’s assistants, celebrated Christmas by penning the following editorial in his rabidly Antisemitic newspaper, Der Stuermer:
If one really wants to put an end to the continued prospering of this curse from heaven that is the Jewish blood, there is only one way to do it: to eradicate these people, this Satan’s son, root, and branch.
It was an appropriate thought for the day. This Christmas, how will we celebrate?
AUTHOR: LAWRENCE KELEMEN

It's okay to "do" Christmas however you choose to celebrate it.  Remember, your way of celebrating it is not the "only" way or the "right" way.  As long as a person gives you a warm acknowledgment from the heart, isn't that really the correct thing to say?  Isn't that what really matters?  They are not taking your Christ away from you by wishing you Happy Holidays; you are losing it for being petty.

And so to everyone I say, Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Happy Whatever you choose to believe in.