Pagan! I recently received the first “my Christian friend at work says celebrating Christmas is wrong because it’s a pagan holiday” note of this December. In case you run into any of those, here was my reply: Regarding the “pagan” holiday roots, I fear you will have little success with your friend. Once a personal stance of superior righteousness is adopted toward a topic, acquiescence become a self-identity fight. Just ask many of the vegans in our society. There are pagan roots to every aspect of life this side of the garden. Surely if Paul could advocate eating meat sacrificed to Aphrodite then we can put up a Christmas tree. The key is the human heart and the focus of one’s worship, not the universally-tainted stuff of earth used in worship. It’s intriguing to me that our Puritan forefathers rejected celebration of Christmas not because of any Solstice connections but mainly because they perceived it as Roman popery. It wasn’t until Washington Irving penned the first American bestseller that things began to shift. His Sketch Book contained Rip Van Winkle, Sleepy Hollow, etc., but it also has his reflections on an “Old Time” Christmas while visiting England. 100 years removed from the Pilgrimage, New Englanders saw via Irving that a jolly Christmas could be had without any “mass” at all; in fact, it was a lovely way to celebrate Jesus’ birth. By the way, similar things can be said to those who complain of the title Xmas. That abbreviation was actually invented by Christians. In Greek, X is Chi, the first letter used to spell Christ. Far from pagan, Xmas was Christian shorthand for celebration of Christ’s birth. God bless you with a jolly, old-fashioned, merry Xmas, Wayne |
