After many years of thinking about it, I have finally sat down to the keyboard to share my views on Christmas with anybody who visits Pego’s Page and opens this short rant.
It seems that for a long time, many people have found fault with the ways Christmas is celebrated and have no qualms expressing their opinion. What had finally forced my hand to write this is the latest battle cry of those claiming there is “war on Christmas” waged by enemies of Christianity.
Let me start with the ones who insist
“Jesus Christ is the reason for the season”.
I am not going to go into a long diatribe naming and analyzing all the holidays and traditions that happen to occur around the end of the year. This has been done by a multitude of authors, some more accurate than others. It suffices to say that the birth of Christ was attached to the time of the end-of-the-year festivities sometimes during the middle ages. Many “traditional” customs being practiced the past two centuries or so have pagan origins, most of them being Nordic. While most biblical scholars agree that the likely birth of Jesus Christ was about 4 BCE, nobody knows the time of the year. Most of them are of the opinion that it was summertime.
_______Hey, the attacks from the secular side are equally, if not more indefensible. (Let me point out for those that have not noticed it yet, secular humanism is my own philosophy. Secular humanists do not walk in a lock step, so criticizing “my own kind” is just fine.)
The secular side tends to point out all the national, ethnic and religious traditions celebrated around the end of the year, many of them being older than the Christianity. They also correctly point out to the blending of all of those traditions.
Where they become absurd is in trying to diminish an undeniable influence of Christian beliefs and customs shaping Christmas over centuries. Besides, "Festival of the Winter Solstice" does not sound nearly as good as Christmas.
__The third group of critics annoys me the most. __“Commercialization of Christmas!”__ What an ugly expression! What is so bad about getting presents for your loved ones? What is so bad about fueling the economy in the process? Giving presents has been a long tradition with Chanukah, another end-of-the-year holiday and other ethnic and religious traditions do it as well. As everybody knows, this group of critics has its own patron saint, Charles Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge. “Bah, humbug”, indeed.
What does Christmas mean to me, you ask? It means a lovely Christmas tree decorated as well as one can. Bright faces of children (adults too, why not). Many years ago, it was our children, for the past few years the grandchildren. It means a festive Christmas Eve dinner with all of the family present (that is the best part) around the table, everybody relaxed, enjoying the togetherness. The dinner includes culinary as well as ritualistic traditions from grandma’s Greek Orthodox eastern Slovak village upbringing (many of the rituals being pagan, but hey, they are grandma’s traditions) with multiple modifiers as we developed our own tradition over close to a half century together. There is a sauerkraut soup, fish, goose and, yes, slivovica, the plum brandy.
MERRY CHRISTMAS
Page 1 - Introduction
Page 2 - Opinions
Page 3 - Review 1
Page 4 - Review 2
Page 6 - Morality