It
being the run-up to Christmas, there are the inevitable and usually
well-intentioned calls to ‘put Christ back in Christmas’ or the excruciating
messages about ‘reason for the season’, and the equally inevitable and seemingly
increasingly common response from a lot of people, primarily atheists, that
Christmas is actually a pagan festival, and that therefore any Christian claims
to the event are spurious and can be ignored.
They claim that Christians ‘stole’ Christmas from the pagans, and
therefore Christians have no right to complain about the secularisation of the
festival.
It’s
fairly obvious to most people that Christmas has indeed now been almost wholly
secularised, with only a few vestigial religious trimmings in the houses and
minds of the vast majority of people, certainly in the UK. However, the claim that Christmas is a pagan
festival seems a strange one to me. I
mean, the clue’s in the name isn’t it?
Christmas is the festival celebrating the birth of Christ, the
incarnation of God; I fail to see how this can be considered as anything other
than a Christian holiday.
Of
course, there are plenty of questions regarding the date, the time of year and
the specific customs involved in the modern celebration of Christmas. Was Christ born on the 25th of
December? Almost certainly not. However, since we don’t know on what date he
actually was born, any date is as good as any other when it comes to
celebrating his birth.
The
Roman festivals of Saturnalia and Die Natalis Solis Invicti (although this latter only
seems to have started well within the Christian era) and the Germanic festival of Yule both
occurred around midwinter, and so the festival for the birth of Christ was
plugged into the existing holiday season to facilitate conversions, and because
even the early Christians liked an excuse for a party). No-one would ever claim that Saturnalia or
Yule are Christian holidays, but then they are not the same thing as
Christmas. Indeed, I will happily agree
that Christ is not ‘the reason for the season’ (ugh!). However, I will maintain that he is the
reason for Christmas.
Regarding
many Christmas customs, a great many of them are indeed pagan in origin. Christmas trees, wreaths etc. are a hangover
from those former festivals, let alone the more obvious ones like Yule logs (again,
the clue’s in the name) but Christmas is (or is supposed to be) a celebration,
and decorating the house for it seems entirely proper. If these decorations are pagan in origin, I
think Christmas has successfully adopted and repurposed them to celebrate the
birth of Christ. Gift-giving occurred
during Saturnalia, but Christmas has taken this and repurposed it to reflect
the gifts of the wise men. That does not
in any way make Christmas ‘pagan’ in and of itself. Plus, I like giving and receiving gifts, so i think we'll keep it in any case.
Should
we try and ‘put the Christ back in Christmas’?
It seems like a good idea to me, but not in the way in which some people
seem to mean it. It does not mean
denying a midwinter festival to anyone else, or even telling people that
they’re not allowed to refer to their holiday as Christmas unless it has Christ
in it. The copyright for the name has
long since expired, although perhaps the secularists might like to think of a
new one (and one better than the cringe-inducing ‘Winterval’). Instead, as others have suggested, perhaps
putting the Christ in Christmas should mean trying a little bit harder to put
Christ’s instructions into action; give to the poor, feed the hungry, cloth the
naked, heal the sick, welcome the stranger, shelter the homeless, love those
who hate you, bless those who curse you, and to ponder on the incredible,
mind-bending idea that the infinite, eternal and all-powerful being that
created and sustains the universe could become human and be born into the world
as a tiny baby.
I
don’t know if I’ll fit in another blog post before heading up to Scotland to
celebrate Christmas with my in-laws, so if not, I hope, dear reader, that you
have a very happy Christmas (with Christ in it or otherwise), or if it’s more
your sort of thing, a happy Yule, Saturnalia, Solis Invicti, or Solstice or
other winter festival of your choice. If
you celebrate none of the above, I wish you a very pleasant Sunday.
