Skip to main content

The benefits of taking Christ out of Christmas

Why do we celebrate Christmas on 25 Dec? There's at least two possible reasons:
  1. Nine months from the date when the angel Gabriel announced to Mary that she would become pregnant (generally taken to be March 25 - but I dunno why);
  2. A Christian adaptation of the Roman, pagan celebration of the northern hemisphere winter solstice. At the winter solstice, the days stop contracting and start getting longer. So it's the sign that the world won't spiral into endless winter. Pagan, earth-worshiping religion take that a sign to celebrate the continuity of life.
I don't know how reliable the dating of the annunciation is - I'll sideline that issue, if that's okay.

I want to propose something. How about we deliberately ditch 25 Dec as being Christmas, and rename it "summer festival of life"? The benefits are:
  1. It's more in line with the original pagan festival - Christians can just pick a different day, some other time in the year;
  2. That's what it is for most people anyway - an excuse to eat & drink & generally enjoy unrestrained indulgent pleasure, which, in a radically hedonistic society, is what it means to 'really live';
  3. For the less crassly indulgent among us - it's a chance to catch up with friends & family and enjoy a holiday from work;
  4. We can get rid of the traditional clutter that pushes Jesus out - Santa Clause, the angels, the shepherds, the wise men, trees, gifts, carols...
  5. As Christians, we agree with point 3. above, and even, to a limited extent, with point 2. God gives us all good things to enjoy - including food and drink, but especially friends and family and relationships. In Australia, we are so wealthy, as a society, that we can take a week or two to rest from our normal work, and refresh our bodies and our relationships. These are all good things, from a Christian point of view. If we call this time of year the "summer festival of life", we can point to the God who gives us life - both the good life in this world that we all enjoy, and eternal life, in the death & resurrection of Christ - and call people to worship him.
Thoughts, anyone?
Labels:

Comments

Nathan said…
I think this is a pretty good idea - particularly because it circumvents the new atheists who keep banging on about how we stole other people's holy festivals.
8 January 2010 at 14:31
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A better understanding of nonbelief

The Nones Project is an ongoing study into the belief systems of people who call themselves non-religious. A few weeks ago one of the project leaders,  Ryan Burge  of Washington University,  posted some really interesting preliminary results  on his Substack.  1. We've probably heard of people who are spiritual but not religious (SBNRs). SBNRs were "the largest group of nones" in the sample. They believe in the supernatural realm but not necessarily in "a God." They are "deeply skeptical of religion but highly interested in spirituality," therefore individualistic and anti-institutional.  2. But this study differentiated SBNRs from people they called Nones In Name Only, NiNos. They different to SBNRs by being religious about their spiritual. They believe not just in the supernatural but in "God." And they tend to engage in traditional communal religious practices while SBNRs practice individualised eclectic bespoke spiritual practices. The s...
Post a Comment
Read more

The different distractions of secularity and spirituality

There has been a lot of discussion about the recent 'vibe shift' away from radical atheism back towards an openness to the supernatural. I don't think this new spirituality is necessarily an openness to the unique claims of Christ. It will more probably replace one set of commonly-accepted misunderstandings about Jesus with another.  Under radical atheism, people dismissed the Biblical claims about Jesus' resurrection because they 'knew' that it was impossible. Jesus hadn't really died. He just passed out (after being beaten and whipped and crucified) and then woke up in the tomb (and rolled away the stone himself and overcame several guards). Or the disciples hallucinated that they saw him (even though Jewish beliefs of the time didn't expect one person to rise possessing eternal life himself; they expected a general resurrection at the end of time - see John 11:24 ). Or something else.  The so-called 'explanations' of Jesus' non-resurrectio...
Post a Comment
Read more
TGC Australia recently published an analysis by Dr Sarah Quicke of whether we are experiencing a 'quiet revival' of interest in and/or conversion to Christianity  here in Australia. It does it a good job of describing the difficulties involved in both gathering and interpreting data about religious beliefs and behaviours, e.g. the difference between the 44% who (still) call themselves Christian and the 8% of people aged 18-35 who actually "believed and lived out the gospel."  Quicke refers to the very insightful McCrindle report An Undercurrent Of Faith , released in March 2025, which uses an analytical method called cohort analysis to try and work out how a particular group of people tend to behave over time. The purpose of this post is to draw attention to one element of that report which agrees with Quicke's analysis but also adds some detail to it.  Here is what the cohort analysis showed about different age groups' identification with Christianity:  As y...
Post a Comment
Read more