Round about the gospel of Luke
If your point is “but many modern Christians ACT like God’s a slightly more grown-up Santa”, though, then I have to agree with you
Would that be the same survey where Mormons and evangelical Protestants scored highest on questions about the Bible and Christianity?
Well at the very least since the Reformation. But that’s also a highly simplistic and not terribly accurate view of Catholicism and Orthodoxy.
That’s the survey, or at least a version of it. It says atheists and agnostics scored the highest overall. Evangelicals scored high on Christianity (achieving a whopping 60% on a very short and easy quiz), but only 44% on world religion questions that any sixth grader should know.
Actually, with questions that easy, no group distinguished itself. The whole result is a tribute the the ignorance of the average American, who reasons that it can’t be mere coincidence that Jesus was born on Christmas.
Christmas is fun. It’s not that complicated. Most people actually aren’t dour theologians.
And this is one of the reasons why it is so foolish to unquestioningly take people who call themselves Christians at their word. Perhaps 50% of people who go to church on a regular basis are actually Christians.
actually I could swear in one of the rankin and bass (don’t remember if it was them exactly ) type of xmas specials the human version of st nick gets too old and one of the angels asks god/jesus to make him immortal since he was a shining example of gods message at work
If you don’t take them at their word, how are they supposed to prove it to you?
There’s no requirement for Christians to know anything about the Bible, or the tenets of their faith, other than that they’re supposed to accept Jesus as their Savior. On the contrary, Jesus said that a childlike faith was far superior to the legalistic approach of the Pharisees. That’s probably one of the reasons it became so popular, along with not wanting to incur the displeasure of rulers and/or conquerors (which was sometimes fatal). You don’t have to know anything, and you don’t have to do anything but accept Jesus before you die.
You may be correct that 50% or more of professed Christians have no interest in learning more than that bare minimum, and there may be denominations that would not accept them, but IMO they still qualify as Christians.
Christians are like homosexuals in this regard. If you tell me you are one, then you are.
Because people have been observing the winter solstice for centuries. Whatever you call ir, there’s some innate need to acknowledge the shortest day in the year.
My wife and I are Christians raising our two kids, and while we taught them about Santa, we were clear from the time they were toddlers that Santa wasn’t real. He was a mythical figure that people (including us, for fun) pretended was real because he represented the Christmas spirit of love and generosity, which are attitudes that Jesus wants us to have. On Christmas, we are celebrating the birthday of Jesus, who is real, and has a real birthday, and was really born and had a real Mommy and was God’s son. Santa is a fictional character that we like and makes us feel good but he’s not a real person. Also, some of your friends probably think that Santa IS real and that’s okay.
On Christmas morning, sometimes gifts would come from “Santa” but it was always as a let’s-pretend kind of thing. We were always up front that the presents were coming from us or other family members.
Similar approach to the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy. Our thinking was long the lines of the OP: If we teach our kids that God is real, and Santa is real, and the EB is real, what happens when they turn 9 and learn that EB and Santa are not real? That immediately throws suspicion on everything else we’ve taught them.
We are saved by Jesus’ goodness (and substitutionary atonement), not our own. “Through the obedience of the one man, the many will be made righteous.” - Romans 5:19. (Loads of similar words in Paul’s letters; this was just the first one that I grabbed.)
I’m new and I’m late to the game here but quite simply, Christmas, Easter and Halloween exist ONLY because the Christians of old were basically left out of all the really cool Pagan holidays. Sooooooo, in order to participate in what would be normal, healthy interaction with other humans, they changed things up a bit so that they could play too. It has only gotten worse since then. Now, all the banksters have figured out what a watershed opportunity all this stupidity is financially. $$$ Always about the dollar nowadays! I could go on but I’d probably be banned or at the very least, scolded firmly and publicly. 
That’s not Christians, that’s Wall Street 
Yeah, but the sourpusses cut out all the *really *fun ones. If only we could still have Bacchanalias…
Yes, more or less. Look, they picked the date of Christ’s birth based upon numerology and other dates given. But for the first millennium or so, it was a minor holiday, if at all. The date was not picked to compete with Sol Invictus or Saturnalia, and by the time Christmas began to be really celebrated, those were long ago notes in history books.
That being said Christmas certainly absorbed many folk or pagan trappings- Yule, mistletoe, and the like.
Christmas is basically a secular holiday. Until just recently, it wasnt really much of a religious holiday for hardly anyone.
Not at all. Christianity has precious little to do with it. Christmas is a hijack of the winter solstice, Easter is one of the spring equinox, and Halloween is half-way between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice. All of which have been celebrated since time immemorial. May Day is half-way between the spring equinox and the summer solstice too.
And because… toys!
On this issue it is.
*toys!
Never been to Mardi Gras or St. Pat’s day?
You might have a point regarding Christmas. Your others are pretty wide of the mark.
Easter is based on an event (Resurrection) that is perceived to be real that is further based on an event (Passover) that is perceived to be real. Given that the events are both movable feasts that do not occur on the equinox and that wander all over the calendar and further noting that the “Spring” nature of the celebrations generally only make sense in Northern Europe, far from their actual locations of origin. I think you are reaching.
Hallowe’en has similar issues. All Saints Day actually began in the Spring, then it may well have moved to Autumn to be closer to Samhain, (although I have never seen evidence that that was the case), but actual Hallowe’en only picked up in the Celtic countries of the furthest Northwest Europe long after Samhain had been forgotten by all but scholars and did not actually become the current festival until it was imported to the U.S. Too much of Europe has no such tradition to justify a “Christians just borrowed pagan celebrations” claim.
ETA: ZombieFatTongue did not really get it right, of course. There is no question that Christianity has “baptized” the rites of any number of pagan celebrations, but the idea that all the Christian feasts are merely renamed pagan feasts is a simplistic claim that misses the nuance surrounding many human endeavors. (If we are going for a fall equinox feast, for example, the September 25 feast of St Michael was celebrated with a week of feasting in parts of Europe for many years.)