Please explain the Christian fascination with Christmas

Great Debates
1

If I understand Christianity properly, salvation through Christ revolves around a few days of Jesus’ ministry: His passion, death, resurrection, and ascencion to Heaven. This is why God sent His Son: to provide a way for humanity to be reconciled to God/be saved/go to Heaven (or however the many ways the same thing is phrased).

In observing Christians’ celebration of the Christian liturgical year, it seems that the common Christian focuses much attention around and devotion to Christmas. There are elaborate, many-day traditions, rituals, observances, expenditures. It is the time of the year when a special spirit supposedly descends to earth, a time when people are more mindful of God, a time when people are nicer, more charitable. There’s something called “the spirit of Christmas” that envelopes and embraces all of the preceding.

But why Christmas? Why not around Easter? (Even though “Easter” isn’t much of a Christian term, I’ll use it anyway, since “the Days of the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus” is too cumbersome.) Even the name doesn’t make sense - why would Jesus’ birth be the seasonal celebration to have His name attached to?

Granted, according to the Christian mythos the birth of Jesus was a miracle, what with it being a virgin birth, escape from Herod’s paranoia, fulfilling scripture/prophecy, etc. As the birth of Lord and Savior of humanity, it is indeed a special occasion. But it is nothing without Easter. Without Easter, there would be no festive occasions to celebrate Jesus. Without Easter there would be no Christianity. Without Easter, there would be, according to Christian theology, no reconciliation between humanity and divinity. Without Easter, there would simply be a miraculous birth amongst a still-estranged humanity, the birth of a leader or teacher. (And the birth of nearly every religious leader is considered miraculous according to popular myths of the people.) Easter should be darkest and brightest, most sorrowful and most joyous event of the Christian year. But, instead, people focus on Christmas when it comes to brightness and joy.

What is it about the Birth that evokes charity, that Christ’s Passion and whatnot does not? What’s so special about the Birth that people festoon their homes and trees with lights, but nothing when the time commemorating Jesus gracious and merciful acts comes around? Certainly, rejoicing in Jesus’ death would be bad, but shouldn’t Christians rejoice juch as much as they do at Christmas, if not more, at Jesus’ resurrection, at the accomplishment of what He was sent to do?

Yes, Easter could not occur without the Birth - Jesus needed to be born in order to die. But that’s just it: He was not born for the sake of being born, He was born to die, but Christians focus so much on His birth.

Why so much attention to the beginning while shortshrifting the end? Why isn’t Easter the time to visit family and relatives, give gifts, be mindful of God, be charitable and generous and kind?

WRS/Thû

2

Because the winter solstice celebration has always been more popular than the the spring celebration. It’s probably the presents.

3

Is there a reason for the popularity of the winter solstice celebration over the spring celebration (assuming this is true)?

As far as presents are concerned - there’s nothing to say Christians must exchange presents at Christmas instead of Easter.

And isn’t there a similar thing going on in Judaism? I mean, I suppose Jews are more in tune with what matters liturgically, what with most celebrating Pesach, Rosh haShanah, and Yom Kippur with attention at least; nonetheless this is with nowhere the enthusiasm of Chanukah (which is a minor festival) - but this may be to counteract the glitz of Christmas. I mean, I like lighting candles too, but there’s more oomph in the Seder or at Yom Kippur services; just as there should be more spiritual oomph for Christians in Easter rather than Christmas.

WRS - am I pitting Christmas?

4

Well, if you didn’t have a clue as to why the sun was going farther and farther away and not sure that it would stop and then…it appeared to be returning… wouldn’t that be something to celebrate? :smack:

I believe it is called making a mountain out of a mole hill. :smiley:

5

Because its the start of it all, the begining. Its a 100% positive aspect of it.

Christmas is an amalgam of many different traditions, Christianity being the most prominant (or the most serious if you will). But as others have said Xmas coincides with various pagan new year celebrations. Xmas trees & lights came to the US via German immigrants.

But mostly, Christmas in America is not a celebration of the past, but of the present (no pun intended).

6

It’s probably important to note that the grand celebration of Christmas is not a long standing or universal thing in Christianity.

7

And to state the obvious, Christmas is an ancient pagan festival appropriated by the Church to get the locals to buy into this whole Christian thing.

8

On a religious level, Easter is a far more important holiday. The Catholic Church for one explicitly makes this clear, with the holidays and rites associated with Lent and Easter being the most important parts of the liturgical year.

That said, even the devoutly religious don’t regard religion as the sole influence in whatever culture they associate with. These other cultural forces often manifest themselves in holiday celebrations.

Some well-observed American holidays have no basis in a particular religion at all. Thanksgiving, Independence Day, Memorial Day, Veterans Day, Labor Day, Mothers Day and Fathers Day all fall into this category. All of these are well loved holidays that are marked with observances in at least certain sectors of the country.

There are more in addition to this, especially when you get to the local level. When I was growing up in Pennsylvania, many school districts held no classes on the first day of deer season.

What this boils down to is that you can judge a holiday’s importance to a faith by examining the faith tradition, and this should suffice. The observances of the broader culture fall into a different category to me. They may well be related, but the differences are striking enough that they really have to be treated separately.

9

There are a bunch of things interconnected here. First, let’s note that Hail Ants has a very important and valid point – the modern “Christmas season” celebration is an amalgam of a large number of traditions, including the pagan Germanic Yule, the Celtic and Roman Winter Solstice celebrations, and, by the way, the attribution of Jesus’s birth to this date. And how it got there is that He was considered to have been conceived on the same day of the year as He was resurrected – so count forward nine months to get His birth date; this date conveniently fell on approximately the same date as the Roman Winter Solstice holiday.

However, one key misunderstanding lies in the first paragraph of the OP:

Well, yeah, you understand evangelicals with a focus on “getting people saved by making them turn to Jesus and accept Him as their Lord” quite well. But that’s not the focus of historic Christianity, where it was one element, an important first step but not the be-all and end-all of Christian life. (To give evangelicals credit, they have begun to run “discipleship” programs for people who have been converted, teaching them how to grow in Christ according to the evangelical paradigm; it’s not merely “Get 'em converted and then go on to the next batch” any more.)

And Christmas was historically the major feast of the Incarnation – the idea that the Word of God, through Whom all things were made and without Whom nothing was made, the active force that motivated the prophets, took on human life and form and became as one of us, living among us as one of us, even becoming a helpless baby, for our sakes. That concept, of God acting to reunite Himself and mankind by making Himself into one of us, sharing the human and divine natures, is key to the whole idea of what Jesus did.

There are dispensationalists in Christianity who claim that all Jesus’s teachings were for the period before His Atonement on the Cross, but they are vastly outnumbered by those who see in His whole life a message of how we should live and of our reunion with God, starting with the Annunciation and the Nativity and working on through His ministry, His death, His Resurrection and Ascension, to His sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

People who focus on the Atonement and the Cross to the exclusion of the rest of His life, including His birth, could truly be said, in one of the standard cliches of this board, to make the Baby Jesus cry! :wink:

10

I don’t think anyone has posted a wrong answer, here, but I would lean toward the notion that people (in the Northern Hemisphere) simply need a celebration around the time of the solstice. Christmas has gone through a numbr of iterations involving revelry and worship. The current aspect of worship (that seems as though it is being overcome by revelry) was imposed in order to counteract the revelry around 200 years ago. The acceptance of the religious celebration from German immigrants actually headed off calls to outlaw the practice of drunken riots in New York at the beginning of the 19th century. Earlier it had been outlawed in Puritan New England. (Puritans and like-minded people influenced by Calvin banned Christmas arguing variously against its “pagan” origins or it hedonistic celebration.) A reading of Malory and similar tales from the same period also provide an odd mixture of worship and revelry.

Religion has actually always had to fight for a place in Christmas. Look at our current iconic images of Christmas from the realm of arts and entertainment: If you sneeze or blink, you will miss the religious expressions in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol; there is no reference to God in Miracle on 34th Street; despite the “heavenly” narration and Clarence’s wings, there is certainly no Jesus-referenced aspect of Christianity in It’s a Wonderful Life; Charles Schultz managed to get a religious message into his first Peanuts Christmas Special, but they went and made a later Christmas show that dropped Christianity right out of the plot (and even the themes).

People like to celebrate at this dark time of year and Christmas simply happens to be the religious feast that picked up the spillover.

11

What Apos said. It’s only in the last 100 years that any big deal has been made of it, and the driving force behind a fair proportion of that time has had very little to do with Christianity and a lot to do with commerce. Christmas Day in Scotland wasn’t even made a public holiday until as recently as 1958.

And then when you consider that most of the Christmas traditions have pagan roots, it’s rather unfair to blame christians for it all.

Curiously most christians are adamant that it’s a christian festival that modern life is debasing. But there are plenty who don’t care for christmas at all and consider it an irrelevance next to Easter.

12

From my own experience, I can say that Easter - Semana Santa - is a lot bigger as celebrations go in Spain. Also, traditionally, kids got their presents there around Twelfth Night, not Christmas. That’s changing and I think most Spanish kids get their gifts on Christmas nowadays.
I think the Christmasyfication has a lot to do with tv and movies, spreading an image over the world how a Christmas should be.
Too bad we’ll have 55F, wind and drizzle all over the coming weekend. Kinda hard to get into the spirit (which I don’t anyway, but I can feel for those who actually try).

13

To answer the OP directly, some Christians do not celebrate Christmas. They do not celebrate birthdays altogether. Their reasoning is that in all of the Christian bible their are only two specific references to birthday celebrations. Unfortunately death results from both of them. The baker is executed at Pharaoh’s(circa the story of Joseph) birthday party. John the Baptist was decapitated as a result of birthday celebrations for Herod.

Is Mohammad’s birthday known and celebrated?

I really think that those outside of the west and the Christian community shouldn’t read to much into the association of Christianity with Christmas. After all, in the British tradition anyway, we celebrate Halloween as well.

14

Good points all.

IMO, one of the reasons that Christians focus on Christmas is b/c we are all cowardly (self included) Christians. Me, I’d rather focus on the birth of a baby and that message of hope and promise than the gut wrenching, painful, tortured death at the other end…we all know the joy a baby can bring. None of us are sure that death will bring Salvation.

I like to think of Christmas as an ecumenical(in it’s universal sense) holiday–I LIKE the pagan aspects of mistletoe and Yule and trees with lights etc. I could never have been one of those factions who did not celebrate Christmas at all (I refer you to colonial New England). Light being a symbol for hope and rebirth etc…it’s all wrapped up together–in fact it would be hard to separate at this point. Hannukah, a minor Jewish holiday, got inflated into something more d/t it’s proximity to Christmas.
IMO, if Christians acted like they do at Christmas, at all times of the year–it would be a good thing for the world. Accepting of other religions, giving, prone to charitable acts, nice …couldn’t hurt.

Now, the Easter Bunny and Easter…I still scratch my head over that one. Somehow the pagan thing doesn’t jive as well there…at least not in our times.

15

It actually is, by a rather sizeable number of Muslims, as Mawlid. It is still very popular, despite the efforts of Wahhabis and neo-Salafis to squelch it as bid’ah and shirk (innovation and idolatry).

16

Heh.

17

[QUOTE=Polycarp]
There are a bunch of things interconnected here. First, let’s note that Hail Ants has a very important and valid point – the modern “Christmas season” celebration is an amalgam of a large number of traditions, including the pagan Germanic Yule, the Celtic and Roman Winter Solstice celebrations, and, by the way, the attribution of Jesus’s birth to this date. And how it got there is that He was considered to have been conceived on the same day of the year as He was resurrected – so count forward nine months to get His birth date; this date conveniently fell on approximately the same date as the Roman Winter Solstice holiday.QUOTE]

The actual Biblical chronology of Christ’s birth does not validate this last statement.

In Luke chapter one it says the priest, Zacharias (John the Baptist’s father) was of the “of the course of Abia”(verse 5). That particular course (two weeks) was the eigth of the 24 courses (see 1 Chron. 25:15) of the priests. The first month of the Jewish year (Abib) would have been late March on our calender, making Zacharias’ course come around in July, four months later. If John was conceived when Zacharias returned home after his ministration (verses 23,24), then Jesus would have been conceived six months later (verse 36), in December–certainly no later than January–making his birthdate September/October, which is hardly “approximately the same date as the Roman winter solstice holiday.”

Moreover, climatologists who are familiar with December weather in that particular area of the world, say it is highly unlikely–given the bitterly cold nights that time of year–that shepherds would have been “abiding in the field” (chapter 2, verse 8) then.

The fact is (which has already been stated in other posts here) the so-called “Christmas” celebration is simply an adaptation by the Roman Catholic Church (and later embraced by Protestants) of the pagan celebration of lights, viz., the turning point from the shortest day of the year, December 24, to the beginning of the new light on the 25th; or going from darkness to light. This was all centered around the worship of the Sun god, Baal. The Catholic church “christianized” the celebration by changing the name of it, and supplanting Baal with Jesus, in order to accomodate the huge Roman pagan population that wasn’t about to stop celebrating this centruries old holiday.

Some of you may say, "so what’s the problem with this? As long as we’re making Jesus ‘the reason for the season,’ our celebration is justified. " What it really boils down to is this: Do we (Christians) believe God meant what he said in Scripture? Furthermore, is it our final authority in faith and practice? If so, and it doesn’t say anything about celebrating his Son’s birthday, or bother to give us an exact date when it occurred, why would we think it’s okay with him (God) to be involved in this celebration? The real question is: Are we interested in obeying God, or in placating our fellow man (Matt. 6:24; Acts 5:29)?

18

The date clearly was chosen to compete with, and replace, the pagan solstice holiday. Early Christians could have easily figured out that it was unlikely that shepards would have been abiding in the field around Dec. 25. Palestine had been conquered by the Romans. Even Christians in Rome who had never been to that part of the world could have easily found and asked other Romans who had what time of the year is consistent with shepards abiding in the field. It just wasn’t considered important to get the exact day right for Christmas. Besides, the early Christians were more focused on Easter. The crucifixion was said to happen at Passover time, so the approximate date for Easter was pretty well fixed.

19

Very interesting. Could you provide a cite on that? I’m particularly interested in why earlier christians believed Christ’s conception took place during the Passover.

20

Can anyone provide info on how cold nights are likely to be in December? I just checked out the forecast for a half a dozen Israeli cities, and none of them were predicting lows below the low 40s (Fahrenheit). Now I will admit that I don’t know where in Israel most of these locations are. But even as a 21st century wimp, I can handle being outside for the night at those temps, with a little basic gear and shelter.