Jesus Is Not the Reason for the Season

With growing smugness year in and year out, Christians love to tout that “Jesus is the reason for the season.”

What a clever slogan. I mean it. From a marketing perspective, the slogan is gangbusters. This makes sense to the average Christmas observer. After all, it’s baby Jesus’ birthday.

The intent of this post is not so much to try to convince you that Christmas is a sham. On the contrary, the purpose is to pique your interest and entice you to explore the customs that most of you practice at this time of the year.

That said, this post will sting to those who cherish Christmas and who cling tight their belief about the holiday.

I’d like to start this post with the smart-ass, half-true observation that the season of winter (or summer in the Southern hemisphere) happened well before the time of Jesus. Now, for the many reasons that Jesus is actually not the reason for the season.

It’s Not Jesus’ Birthday
This is the number one reason that most do not know or refuse to recognize: Jesus was not born on December 25. Although the bible doesn’t specify an exact date for Jesus’ birth, most objective scholars agree that all the clues point to a spring birth. That’s why there was no room at the inns, because it was time for the census and that required everyone to return to their place of birth in order to be counted.

It’s Saturn’s Birthday
When the Catholic church was just forming as the dominant (and for a long stretch of history, the only) form of Christianity, they chose to celebrate Jesus’ birthday on December 25 because they knew that the pagans they were attempting to convert would never give up their cherished tradition of Saturnalia.

Many Mid-Winter Holidays Aren't Christian
Celebration of the Winter Solstice is the oldest known celebration in the history of homo sapiens. Today in the United States of America, people celebrate all sorts of holidays that relate to either their religion, ancestry, or rejection of past traditions within the last two weeks of the year. Such major holidays include Chanukah, Kwanzaa, Winter Solstice, Yule, and the increasingly popular Festivus (Thanks, Frank Costanza!)

Most Christmas Traditions Come from Other Religions
The decoration of Christmas trees dates back to Wassailing, a pagan tradition of decorating one apple tree in mid-winter as a fertility rite for the entire orchard. Holly and mistletoe date back to Celtic mythology and Druidic rituals. Lights are an integral part of Chanukah. Santa Claus’ origins reach as far back as the Greek’s Basil of Caesarea. And gift giving goes back as far as Saturnalia.

Gifts: WWJD?
One last word that is meant more as a criticism of the hypocrisy that runs rampant throughout Christianity: Jesus would reject the unabashed consumerism that has come to mark Christmas. If more Christians rejected the consumerist version of Christmas and gave even half as much to the poor and downtrodden regardless of their religious beliefs as they do to friends and family, the world would be a much, much better place.

A Final Word
With or without Jesus, the winter holiday season would still exist and thrive because it is a down and opportune time. Nature can’t be cultivated at this time in most regions of the northern hemisphere. The crops have all been harvested. Cold weather has taken hold along with the long, dark days. What else is there to do but relax and revel with friends and family? Jesus is most definitely not the reason for the season. To insist he is, rejects the pluralism that makes this world so very beautiful.

Capt. Kathryn Janeway on Coffee

"I beat the Borg with it."
— Captain Kathryn Janeway in response to Commander Chakotay's concern that she might drink too much coffee. Star Trek Voyager Season 4 Episode 15 "Hunters"

A Pat on My Back

Just a quick note on PageRank:
The publication/social network I left awhile back struggles to maintain a PageRank of 2-3.
In the meantime, my humble blog wavers between 4-5.

The social network's reported monthly hits? Over 150,000
My monthly hits? Between 290-400

This is cause for both head-scratching and revelry. Is it that quality will always trump quantity, or something else?

Our First Winter Solstice Celebration

Seven years ago, we turned our Christmas upside down…well, our tree anyway. With two boys of one and three years old, we stood at a pivotal point in our family’s future. Do we continue with the traditions we grew up on, or do we explore other winter holidays to discover our own? We weren’t Christian, so why would we want to keep Jesus as the reason for the season? We also didn’t want to encourage our boys to continue engaging the stress so rampant during the consumer-based holiday.

We really only worried about stealing the magic of the holiday we knew as children from our own. In particular, the magic of Santa Claus. How could we deny them that feeling of wonder we felt as children, stumbling into a living room piled with presents that weren’t there when we went to bed?Santa is fun, but one thing troubled us greatly with the propagation of the myth: We’d be lying to our kids. Telling them that someone named Santa brought them presents every year would violate the importance we place on honesty. After much deliberation, we decided to give up Santa and to instead grant them a celebration equivalent to, if not exceeding, the joy of the traditional Christmas. We partied from dusk to dawn.

We chose to celebrate solstice, because as prior Alaskan residents, we understood the importance of December 21/22. We knew it meant the sun would grace us with its presence much more often. Our research led to some striking revelations. We learned that Christmas trees were hung upside down in most homes until about 150 years ago. After hanging ours upside down, we understood why. Not only did it create a much more beautiful display, but it was also an amazing space saver.

We learned that the practice of decorating trees stems from the medieval ritual of Apple Wassailing, performed to ensure crop fertility. While the matron of the home was knee deep in baking the holiday bread, the lord of the manor would crash through the door, dash the dough to the ground, and push everyone in the family out to the prized apple tree in the orchard. They would dance around the tree, pour cider made from the previous year’s crop on its roots, and decorate it. We re-enacted this ceremony at the start of our celebration, only I assumed the role of baker instead of Renee, and we decorated the walnut tree in our front yard.

To keep the child-like energy of the season, we invited about 10 kids over to join us. We also invited adults, but they declined. We loaded our refrigerator with sodas and put together candy-filled packages. The trick was to keep the kids up all night, until the sun rose. We told them stories of how ancient people believed the sun might set and never rise again unless they reveled all night, yelling out to the sun to rise, rise, rise.

We told the story of the Holly King and the Oak King and their quest to gain control, and how their power waxes and wanes until the other eventually regains control. Then we clipped some holly and oak from our yard and made it the first addition to our Yule Log, which after adding personal affects chosen by all the guests before the celebration, we burned in our barbecue while drinking hot cocoa.

Some of the kids were a bit freaked out by the upside down tree, others loved it. Some wished they got the piece of the cake with the coin in it. All claimed that they would be the one to wake the sun in the morning. When el sol finally rose that morning, two of them were left to squint into the glory of solar radiation…our three year old boy and a thirteen year old girl. The older of the two looked at the younger and said, “Now that we’ve woke the sun, let’s wake the others.”

*This entry was originally written for www.localsguide.com.