Here’s may latest rant on my favorite Culture War issue:
It’s War on Christmas season again. Every year the season that is supposed to be a celebration of good will gets caught in the crossfire between those who complain that, “they’re taking the Christ out of Christmas” and those who complain that Christianity is being rammed down their throats. Some folks feel they need to express defiance towards the trend to generically refer to “The Holidays”, declaring, “we say Merry Christmas” (rather than “Merry Christmas”), while others feel they musn’t so much as put up a string of colored lights, lest they’ll have succumbed to the pressure to observe someone else’s religion.
But all this divisiveness is totally unnecessary. We’re not talking about one single thing, one holiday, but a diversity of different seasonal traditions, the observance of which are spread out over the course of a month or more. Some are specific to certain religious faiths, and some secular—or secularized—and thus appropriate for everyone.
By now most of us know—or should know—that most of the familiar December holiday customs derive from pre-Christian pagan traditions. Gift giving, outdoor lights, the colors red and green, decorating with evergreens, family feasts, and the Dec. 25th date itself , they all come from ancient winter solstice celebrations, specifically Roman Saturnalia and Norse Yuletide.
Although the 17th century New England Puritans understood the pagan origins well enough to ban observance of the holiday, by now it should be understood that no reference to pagan religions are intended and these customs are purely secular. But centuries earlier the popularity of the holiday traditions was such that the medieval Church adopted a can-lick-em-so-join-em policy. December 25th was re-purposed as the occasion for the “Christ Mass”—the observance of the birth of Jesus, even though he was probably born in the late spring. All that revelry was rationalized as understandable excitement at the prospect of attending that particular church service.
There has always been an element of solemnity in the season of the “rebirth of the Sun”, so it’s inevitable that Christian culture would redirect the meaning as one focused on Christ. But in a multi-cultural society, the solemn or religious meaning can be understood in different ways by different groups, each in turn being “plugged in” to the broader set of, secular seasonal observances that are appropriate for everyone. After all, if the promotion of “peace on Earth and good will towards all” is to be a central theme of the Holiday season, then it can hardly be regarded as strictly for Christians only.
