:: In.a.Mirror.Dimly ::

Should we even celebrate Christmas in the first place?

Perhaps I should have asked this question before we spent all of our savings on black Friday and cyber-Monday, but better late than never. You did save your receipts, right? I’m asking a loaded question about Christmas that may devastate some and bring relief to others.

Answering this question requires at least two posts in order to examine what we’re celebrating and then, in the next post, how we should celebrate it.

I’d like to begin by looking at what Christmas celebrates:

Every year somebody trots out the supposedly damning history of Christmas in order to prove that everything we do is somehow connected to the pagan worship of trees and big box stores. I’ll admit, reading the History Channel’s guide to Christmas would make Scrooge sing with glee.

The early church didn’t even think to celebrate Christmas. And even when it did catch on in the 300’s, it developed into more of a wild romp like Mardi Gras than a line of angelic choir boys singing Silent Night with glowing candles.

Over the years the meaning and celebration of Christmas evolved, and in the 1800’s it took on the sentimental, family-centered, gift-giving emphasis that has taken hold to this day. In a sense, Christmas preserves many of the high ideals of the Victorian period in the late 1800’s.

So what exactly is Christmas all about?

Is it really all about celebrating the birth of Jesus? From the best that we can tell, Christians first celebrated Christmas as a way of both sanctifying a pagan feast day and honoring the birth of Jesus, which in and of itself is not a bad thing.

God came to redeem our world, and it’s not too far of a stretch to include our holidays and festivals. If we’re going to celebrate something in the winter, as most people do, why not rework these feasts into something focused on God’s saving work? The metaphors work, and the writers of scripture use metaphors and images regularly.

Jesus is the light of the world, the lamb of God, and the bread of life.

Interestingly enough, “Christmas” began with Christianizing pagan feasts, but in the end we commercialized the Christianized pagan feast. So therefore, Christmas has always had this tension between the sacred and the secular.

There is no “pure” celebration of Christmas.

Christmas has always been a tangled mess of priorities and traditions that have morphed and changed over time in both the religious and secular categories.

In brief, the Christmas holiday has always been about gathering with friends during the coldest, darkest part of the year. It only makes sense to celebrate the coming of God’s redeeming light at the same time.

In the end, I think Christmas isn’t as clean and pure as we’ve been lead to believe, but even after we remove the sparkling veneer, we still find a valuable holiday to celebrate because it calls to mind the incarnation of Jesus and the launching of God’s plan to eradicate evil and to redeem his creation.

Nevertheless, how exactly should we celebrate the arrival of God during Christmas?