I don’t think your cite (hardly without agenda) is as debunking as you seem to. The approximate date of Christmas is obviously relevant to its accretion of those non-Christian ritual elements,* which played a part in both the acceptance of Christianity itself in some cultures, and the preeminence of Christmas in the Western secular calendar. That Christians may have come up with the approximate (presumably incorrect, as a matter of history) date on their own doesn’t signify that much.
And the seasonal festivals of different traditions are not unrelated. Even if invented independently, the basic impetus is the same.
Err… regardless of the accuracy of the arguments about the genesis of the Christmas date and the role of other traditions’ rituals… it’s not disputable that there were other traditions.
Yes, but would it represent anything like what Christmas represents in the public mind nowadays? Popular culture has Christmas as representing kindness and peace and warm, gooey sentiments along those lines, but that’s because its origin is as the birth date of the Christian savior who preached stuff like “turn the other cheek” and “let he who is without sin cast the first stone” and concepts of niceness like that. Is that what the various pagan winter celebrations had as their theme? Or Hanukkah, for that matter?
How so? Memorial Day = summer, Labor Day or Thanksgiving = fall? What’s the spring celebration, Easter? I don’t think any of those were founded as simple seasonal passage celebrations, (I guess I can hear Thanksgiving as a fall/harvest festival, but even then, it’s commemorating the specific event at Plymouth) and by the same token, a winter one probably wouldn’t have existed without some pretext for a holiday, later co-opted as a more generic seasonal thing. Which is pretty much what HAS happened, with Christmas being that pretext.
You are conflating “Holiday” with “celebration”. They are not the same thing. Go into any arts & crafts store, they will have tonnes of Fall etc decor for generic Autumn decorating.
You bring up Thanksgiving, but altho that* date* is sorta/kinda/vaguely set due to Plymouth, a Autumn/Harvest fest is pretty universal.
I just skimmed through the original text of what has become the most iconic story of Christmas for well over a century. There appears to be a single short clause where the author alludes to jesus, not mentioning him by name but imagining him in the context of children playing games.
I submit that the Christians may or may not have stolen the holiday, but they have since surrendered it. In their efforts to popularize it, they let it be watered down, to the point that, being raised in a very religious family (my father was a seminarian), I have no memory of going to church in the 25th.
It is simply not a religious holiday, and any claims that it is fall as futile protests. The Christians gave it up, it is unlikely that they will be able to get it back. “Christmas” may derive from “Mass for Christ”, but now it merely means “time to have a party/row by the fire with family”.
The main point is that the date of Christmas comes as a consequence of the feast of the Annunciation (and Crucifixion) and not on its own, so it is only related, chronologically, to winter/solstice festivals, but it is not in itself such a festival; so it does signify much.
Of course some of the ways people celebrated a religious festival has non-religious/pagan characteristics. Here in Peru, for instance, the Señor de los Milagros processions are inextricably connected to eating turrón de Doña Pepa and anticuchos, Peruvian creole music, and bullfighting.
For a believer, trees, yule logs, stockings, Santa, and turkey are part of the way we commemorate, but if you take them away you still get the main thing which is the birth of Jesus. Other countries have other non-Christian/pagan traditions added to Christmas.
For non-believers, of course, they can celebrate how they want or not celebrate at all. I can, of course, agree that for many it has become more of a civil holiday than a religious one.
Not at all; simply, an eradication/annihilation, eradicating an ideology not acceptable to a certain group, and then replacement with a new regime, er, set of traditions to ‘cleanse’ the observants and make them more acceptable. How can that be called a ‘war’???
Yes, I do remember calling for jackbooted thugs to bust into people’s houses and smash their nativity displays and disappearing those who resist. :rolleyes:
Most every culture in the northern hemisphere celebrates the return of the sun. Christians hang up lights and eat rich food and give each other gifts. Jews light a massive rack of candles on the night of the new moon that is closest to the winter solstice, and eat rich (oily) foods and give each other gifts. Whoever invented Yule light fires and ate rich food and exchanged gifts. The Roman Saturnalia sometimes sounds like more of an orgy, or a general overturn of social rules, but it seems to have included gifts and feasts.
I really don’t think it’s a coincidence that when it’s cold and dark outside, people find excuses to light a lot of lights and celebrate with rich food. Each social/religious group has invented it’s own excuse, and in America, we call it “Christmas” because that was the Christian excuse for a mid-winter holiday.
As an American Jew, I’m not thrilled that Christians managed to get a lock on the branding of the holiday. I’m quite jealous of my Russian immigrant friends who can put up New Year’s trees without their community saying “tsk, tsk”, that’s not Jewish". And it’s not as if any of the parts of the holiday I am inclined to celebrate have any religious significance. I am uninterested in celebrating the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, but I enjoy lights and cookies and family and gift exchanges. Yes, I enjoy the secular holiday called Christmas that happens to coincide with a Christian religious holiday of the same name. I’d be happy if the secularists succeeded in re-branding it, but I don’t see that happening in my lifetime.
And let’s not hold up Festivus – that is the midwinter holiday with all the fun parts stripped out, and just the uncomfortable parts left.
Coincidence. Hanukkah is a celebration of the events that happened on that day of the Hebrew calendar in 165 BCE (give or take). It’s a historical (and, if you’re a religious believer, miraculous) event having nothing to do with celebrating the sun. Your own instinct to mash together all known winter holidays into a single underlying universal principle is simple an artifact of the importance that Anglo-American, predominantly Christian culture has attached to Christmas.
Cmkeller, I know that is the claim, and I don’t believe it. It strains credibility that Jews are lighting a big rack of candles in the darkest night of the year, and that just coincidentally happens to be the exact day a historical victory occurred.
The ‘lots of presents’ thing is obviously an American parental reaction to their kids being jealous of Christmas, but the traditions of lights and rich foods are old and were presumably developed by Jews more-or-less on their own, and despite the religious claim (which I grew up with) I believe the holiday was inspired and timed by the solstice.
You can believe whatever you want to believe, but it would be nice to have some sort of cite to back it up. The claim that you so blithely dismiss has been stated to be the origin of the holiday for millennia, in sources more ancient than the Talmud. In addition, it might be noted that the date of Hanukkah is fixed on the lunar HEBREW calendar, not the solar one, and does not always fall so close to the solstice - two years ago, for example, Hanukkah coincided with Thanksgiving, and the new moon closest to the solstice that year was not the one that takes place on Hanukkah but the following one.
Other elements of Hebrew history appear to be somewhat temporally backfilled. The words of Moses were composed centuries after he would have actually lived. I for one am not fully convinced that Hanukkah was a major holiday for that long.
No doubt, i agree the date of Hanukkah was not made up to get a winter holiday. However, after Judas Maccabeus stopped his annual celebration of his victory, the holiday became very minor.
There’s a lot to be said that it’s current prominence (and method of celebration) in the Jewish community, a prominence that far outstrips it’s very minor religious celebration- is due to the fact that holiday was for all intents and purposes resurrected and given new prominence so as to give Jewish people a rival to Christmas.
After all, the holiday has no Tanakh origin. Many other holidays of Tanakh origin are hardly heard of outside the Jewish faith.
I completely agree that the current prominence of Hanukkah in Jewish culture is due to its proximity to Christmas. However, while it is true that the holiday is post-Biblical and minor (compared to the Biblical ones), the celebration of it was certainly religiously ritualized since the original times. It’s mentioned (granted, very little, only in passing, but it IS mentioned) in the Mishnah and (more so) Talmud, and the laws relating to the holiday are in all the organized Jewish books of law, from Maimonides on forward. It may not have been major, but it was certainly observed continuously.
cmkeller, do I need a cite for the date of Hanukkah? Seriously? No, the Hebrew calendar doesn’t exactly keep track of the solar one, but Hanukkah is a winter holiday, usually the month closest to the winter solstice, and the last night falls close to the new moon.
Chabbad says Hanukkah starts the 25th of Kislev, between Nov 28 and Dec 26. That’s always close to the winter solstice. I guess the 8th night is slightly after the new moon, but the whole holiday falls at the darkest nights of the year.
And I found a cite supporting my theory, but suggesting that the Greeks desecrated the Temple on the 25th to leverage the ritual power of the dark of the year, a festival celebrated in their Syrian home. It also suggests the ancient Jews choose to turn that date into a Jewish celebration (chanukah) the same way the Christians timed Christmas, to compete with other local solstice holidays.
Well, I can’t deny you’ve found a cite that agrees with your theory. Mind you, the author of that cite himself says that it’s several points of speculation.
As I said, people can believe whatever they want to, and formulate alternate explanatory theories that sound logical to them. However, I find it disingenuous to concoct such theories when there is already a traditional explanation. Josephus, hardly a religious Jew, wrote only two centuries after the event of the holiday as a celebration of renewed religious freedom after Syrian/Greek religious suppression, because that was the actual date on which the Temple service was able to be resumed. Is an alternate theory, one without that kind of support, necessary? The only justification would be an a priori rejection of the usual explanation because of its roots in religious tradition. This is not a position I find sustainable.