Christmas Balance

I've been back and forth over the years on the issue of Christmas. I think I'm finally finding the balance.

As a child, it was a wonderful, magical time. Memories of Christmas trees and presents and holiday music and food make me wax nostalgic. I'll never forget Dad pulling us on sleds to church one year. I also have fond memories of picking out the tree each year, and of Mom working endlessly to decorate the house and prepare for the various festivities. And we would stretch the holiday out over a week or more by visiting different relatives and exchanging gifts each time.

As I got older the "magic" kind of wore off, but not long after, I began learning more about Jesus and what it really meant to be a Christian. The celebration of his birth gave the season a whole new meaning that was awe inspiring. We had a big lit-up nativity set on our lawn in those days (including a make-shift stable that I helped Dad build). I believed and proclaimed that Jesus was the Reason for the Season. But that was not to last.

When I got involved with The Way, I learned that Jesus wasn't really born on December 25th. I was also taught that most of the traditions and customs of the holiday season were "pagan" in origin. Putting Christ back in Christmas was not possible, we said, because he was never there to begin with. Nevertheless, in The Way we allowed for celebrating the holidays as a time for family and togetherness.

Years passed, I moved to different areas and my siblings moved in different directions with their own families. And the "household" that had been The Way disintegrated. For a few years there was a small group of us in Rhode Island that were family-like, and it was our custom that anyone who had nothing else to do gathered at one house or another. It was fun, but I still saw Christmas largely as a worldly, secular custom that I just put up with every year.

After moving again and eventually getting kicked out of the group I was with in Syracuse, NY, I pretty much ignored Christmas. There seemed little reason for celebration, and there was now nothing to counterbalance the crass commercialism and drunken revelry that typified most of the world's holiday festivities.

While most scholars know that December 25th is almost certainly not the birth of Christ (for one thing the shepherds would not have had their flocks in the field at night in December), the consensus seems to be that we don't really know when he was born. (Dr. Ernest L. Martin made a good case for it having been on September 11, 3BC. They had adopted this idea in The Way, but I have since found the book where they got it from, The Star That Astonished the World. If you're interested, check out Dr. Martin's web site.)

But I learned something this year. It had been said that since we don't know when Jesus was born, December 25th is as good a time as any to celebrate it. But I still couldn't see going along with what I thought was the "white-washing" of pagan rituals. However I recently found out that many of the claims about the pagan origins of Christmas are not historically accurate.

While there are similarities between our Christmas customs and those the Romans had in celebrating Saturnalia, there is no evidence that one developed from the other. To be sure, many pagan customs have been mixed with the celebration of the birth of Christ. But there is evidence to show that Christmas was established on December 25th, not to "compromise" by adapting the pagan holiday to Christianity, but to present an alternative to the pagan holiday, so that Christians would have something to celebrate that wasn't idolatrous.

There are a couple of good online articles about this, by Dr. Richard P. Bucher. If you're interested, check out Christmas is Not Pagan, and The Origin and Meaning of the Christmas Tree.

Besides, even if Christmas customs did have pagan origins, they no longer hold that meaning today, for the most part. There isn't any Biblical reference to celebrating the birth of Christ, but there isn't anything forbidding it either. The Bible says that nothing is unclean of itself. It's what we do with it that makes it good or evil. If someone feels that it's pagan to decorate a tree, then they shouldn't do it. But if someone wants to celebrate Christ's birth with a pure heart, as many Christians have done for a few hundred years, there is certainly nothing wrong with it.

After several years of rethinking my beliefs, I have a renewed understanding and appreciation of Jesus Christ, whom I believe to be the promised Messiah, the coming King foretold by the Prophets. And after reading about the historic Christian symbolism of the Christmas tree in the above referenced articles, I can again enjoy Christmas, with the knowledge that those who say "Jesus is the Reason for the Season" may not have been duped after all.

(P.S. - I wrote a little Grinch parody called, "How The Way Stole Christmas." It's posted on the Grease-Spot Cafe, a forum for ex-members of The Way.)