X-Mas Exasperations

I have a rant for you today! ♫It's my blog and I can cry if I want to...♪

For years, I have been writing posts that try to get to the historical origins of dates and traditions of the holidays. I happen to be writing a new one these past couple of weeks. Those posts usually come across in favor of holidays. That's just how the chips fall naturally. Look. I read history and I tell you what history says. Simple. Some people say holidays are pagan, we investigate and usually find that's not true, and we write about it. That makes us look like we are 100% pro-holiday. But we aren't 100%.

One of the things that makes As Bereans Did so effective at digging for truth is our insistence on facing our own biases (which everyone has) for the goal of staying neutral. Whether we love something or hate it, doesn't matter much. We want the truth. Regardless. The truth can take care of itself. To do this, one must consider both sides. Hence, you will see us saying people like Herbert Armstrong were right sometimes, or that we don't like certain Halloween traditions. That approach has an unfortunate side-effect of making one a Moderate. Nobody loves a moderate. Everyone adores a zealot (who agrees with them). Who would you rather have on your side - a zealot who will say anything no matter how ridiculous so long as it supports you, or a moderate who says, "Well... they have a point." ?? Thought so.

Today, I am going to play devil's advocate and purposefully rant about the negative side of modern Christmas in the United States of America and vent about some things I don't like. Today, I complain about modern Christmas in America. Pardonne moi, I mean X-Mas - because some people want "Christmas' to be an offensive word even as they celebrate it. For just one example, Neiman Marcus recently changed the name of their seasonal catalog, which had been called "Christmas Book" for 100 years, to "Holiday Book". I saw a door mat at Costco the other day that said something like "Happy Celebration". They couldn't even say holiday.

Oh, where to begin? There is so much to dislike!
Christmas is a wonderful time of year. But let's face it, "wonderful" in this world does not mean perfect.

SECULARLISM

I think the top complaint I personally have about Christmas in America is that it has been taken over by secularism. Everything else in my post seems to extend from this.

Author and researcher Ronald Hutton, in his book "Stations of the Sun", makes a strong case that the secularism in Christmas can be laid at the feet of two things. First, Protestants in England and Scotland. By trying to ban it in the 1600s to spite the Catholics, the Puritans only succeeded in stripping it of its religious nature. They inadvertently caused the rise of secular traditions. Second, the Industrial Revolution shoulders blame. The world is a very different place because of it.
I envy those nations who were never robbed of the special sacred nature of their day.

Martha wrote my personal favorite series in all of the ABD catalog, the "Falsely Accused?" series. So very well researched and written. She investigated the history of Christmas Trees. In one post, "Falsely Accused? Nazi Propaganda Lives On...", she demonstrated the Nazis played a big part in secularizing modern Christmas. It worked!
Thanks a lot, Adolf. You were just a peach. (He said, sarcastically.)

Christmas in the old days was twelve days long - the Twelve Days of Christmas. It wasn't the month-long behemoth we see now. In the past, people went to church on Christmas day, did a parade through town, maybe they would catch an instructional play put on by the church, they had a nice meal at home with family and friends or went to a lavish dinner at a Lord or King's estate, they would play some games and tell some stories - tales from the past and spooky ghost stories were very popular, maybe you would go caroling or souling to raise some money for the church or a charity, and that was about how it went. Gift-giving was not central. Gifts were the realm of St. Nicholas' Day or New Year's. I read a version of "Old Christmas" from Washington Irving every year because I like to think about how Christmas used to be celebrated in some places back before there was a Coca Cola or a Nazi propaganda machine. It was quite different from today. Basically, a more religious version of Thanksgiving.

Without Jesus at the center of Christmas, the celebration has no context. What is the context, then? It's not on the solstice. There is no natural purpose for it. It just becomes a winter festival, giving people something to drink about. Most claims of paganism are either completely false or they arose after December 25 was chosen by Christians. The day just becomes a day of nothing in particular, with traditions from the 1900s made ever bigger. Secular America took Christmas and said, "We can't find any good reason for this day, but we like the pretty lights and trees and songs, so we want to keep it around. But what do we do and why?? Hey! Let's make the day ABOUT the lights and trees and songs!"
So, you have a feast for the emotions and the senses, complete with Darth Vader ornaments, ugly sweaters, 25-foot-tall inflatable Santas, $10,000 synchronized LED light displays, and $60,000 luxury automobiles wrapped up in large red bows. Santa has completely replaced Jesus. The tree goes up a month before Christmas rather than on Christmas Eve. The twelve days of Christmas are gone. Only history nerds have ever heard of Twelfth Day. The tree and the ornaments simply exist for their own decorative sake rather than as symbols with specific religious meanings. And then tales of ancient pagan origins get tossed in there to explain it all apart from the Nativity, even though they are not accurate.

I am just expressing the sad fact that, in a post-Christian world, Christmas isn't even considered a Christian holiday by most of the people who celebrate it. Because many people who go about with Merry Christmas on their lips - excuse me, Happy Holidays, because how dare we speak Merry Christmas - would hardly even qualify as barely-churched. Harry Potter celebrates Christmas for crying out loud.

Some Christians say we should abandon the day because it has become too secular. Great idea. How'd that work out the first time with the Puritans? That's the main reason we're in this mess in the first place. And what does that mean, anyway? "Too secular." Is there some kind of a scale I am unaware of? Why should we abandon our day because secular people like it, too? Rome used to be "too secular". If we abandoned everything that is "too secular", we might as well go back into the catacombs. What's your alternative? Winter Family Fun Night? Right! As if whatever alternative you come up with is not also going to eventually be coopted by secularism. Then you're right back where you started.
I say we make a stand. I say we reclaim Christmas! Secularism may be my biggest complaint, but that doesn't mean I'm going to surrender to it. Quite the opposite!

All you have to do to get started is to make sure your Christmas is about Jesus. That's what I'm doing. You don't have to throw out your decorations or become a curmudgeon. Just focus it on Jesus. Next year, add in more charity. It's that simple!

Yeah, yeah. I know some people will mock the idea of "put Christ back in Christmas". "Christ never was in Christmas," they say. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Look here! This is the As Bereans Did blog. We've already done the homework. We are on year 14 of doing the homework. We have investigated pagan origins more times than we can count, and we feel completely justified in absolutely rejecting that as complete nonsense. Go sell "once pagan, always pagan" somewhere else. You want to insist Christians coopted Christmas? That's not a winning message. All that says to me is we did it once and we can do it again.

CONSUMERISM & EXCESS

I like Christmas gifts, but not the way we do it these days. As I said earlier, Christmas was not originally the big gift-giving holiday. True story! Thank the Protestant Reformation for that.
Thank you, Martin Luther. Thank you, King Henry VIII. You're both just a peach. (He said, sarcastically.)
*deep sigh*

All those overblown tales you hear about Christmas in the distant past being a wild and debauched day are not at all representative of the majority. Stories like that tend to rely on abandoned claims from the 1800s. You might find a group of people in some place at some time doing some questionable things. I'm not here to rant about the medieval French, though. The typical Christmas day was not like that on the whole.
Not any more!

I think this complaint about Christmas is less about Christmas, per se, and more about a certain disappointment with the world in general. It's the same complaint I could make about nearly anything. There is too much! And it's too commercial! I like modern medicine, but not drug commercials and suspicions that pills are more about keeping people manageably sick than truly healing them. I like grocery stores, but not highly processed foods and seed oils and et cetera that are cheap but terrible for you. I like the convenience of driving, but not used car sales people, cars that are designed to break, gambling on the right insurance coverage that might never pay out when you need it most, overcrowded highways, political manipulation of gas prices and road taxes, and a hundred other things. Do you see my point? Greed distorts everything it touches, not just Christmas.
But is has touched Christmas.

I got a comment recently correlating Christmas decorations and Herbert Armstrong's purchase of the Czar's golden flatware (and Steuben crystal, and $2,500 bottles of Remy Martin Lousi XIII cognac, and private jets, and mansions, and...). I disagree with the comment. It goes too far. But! It's not like that comment is entirely off the mark. The heart of that comment is about exploitation, and I think we all agree we are against exploitation (at least in theory). Christmas has become a festival of consumption. I am not an anti-Capitalist by any means, but some of those criticisms cannot be entirely dismissed. People seem to go bananas for spending all of their money on junk. Junk primarily made in Chinese sweat shops. Junk that does not honor Jesus. Junk that does nothing to aid in our Gospel message. Junk that brings no glory to God at all. How did that monologue go in the Jim Carey version of "How The Grinch Stole Christmas"?

"That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? That’s what it’s always been about. Gifts, gifts… gifts, gifts, gifts, gifts, gifts! You wanna know what happens to your gifts? They all come to me. In your garbage. You see what I’m saying? In your garbage! I could hang myself with all the bad Christmas neckties I found at the dump. And the avarice. The avarice never ends! ‘I want golf clubs. I want diamonds. I want a pony so I can ride it twice, get bored, and sell it to make glue!’"

I mean, he's not entirely wrong.

The car commercials, where the one comes home with an $80,000 Lexus in a bow, only to find the other got them a $90,000 truck in a bow. Or the jewelry commercials, where the man is encouraged to buy a $10,000+ engagement ring for the woman of his dreams. Who are these people anyway? Those commercials make me cringe. Can't afford a new 1,000 horsepower European hyper-car? We can accommodate you! Black Friday starts in early November now. There's pre-Black Friday, Black Friday, after-Black Friday, Cyber Monday, door busters, extended hours, and deep discounts on Chinese junk of every shape and hue.
Have you listened to the lyrics of "Up On The Housetop" lately? Little Will gets, "a hammer and lots of tacks, also a ball and a whip that cracks." Kids these days would burn down the house if that's what they got.

Let Neiman Marcus change the name of their catalog. I prefer it! Christmas isn't about what's in that book anyway.

I gotta hand it to ol' Herbert Armstrong; sometimes he had clever lines. (He was a detergent salesman after all.) One of his better lines was, "The way of give vs. the way of get." The secular, consumerist Christmas is fairly well in the "way of get" category. The people who say "Christmas is pagan" may be factually incorrect, so far as its origins go, but the people who say "Christmas is consumerist" are not.

I wish I had an "all you have to do" simple answer for this problem. What do you do about consumerism? Set a spending limit. Set expectations up front that you're not going to do Christmas that way anymore. Buy less junk. Give less gifts, and give more to charity. Notice that I didn't say, "Give no gifts." I just said give less gifts ...to people who already have, and give more to people who do not. Charity. It's the Christian way.

I want everyone who reads this blog to give me a Christmas gift this year. And the gift I want is for you to give is something to the poor. Donate, volunteer, whatever you can do. You give to me by giving to them. That's what I want for Christmas. It's the same thing Jesus asked for this year!

BUSY-NESS

The secularism leads to the consumerism, and the consumerism leads to the busy, busy, busy-ism. All the crowds, the traffic, the noise, the events, the family get togethers, the friends' get togethers, the work get togethers, this, that, and the other thing. GAH!

It's bad enough to have to fight through the crowds at every store to pick up a gift, but much more often than not I am only trying to do my regular, day-to-day shopping, and to fight the crowds just to get a gallon of milk and some bread adds insult to injury. This isn't a hurricane, people! I just want some milk and bread and I'm gone! ... GAH!

The streets are bumper-to-bumper from November to February. If people aren't shopping for gifts, they're returning gifts. Streets wouldn't be so very crowded and drivers so very angry if not for that one person who is moving at a crawl because they're so terrified of the traffic. If you are so terrified, then you are the very danger you fear! Perhaps car pool? GAH!

I do not want to see my co-workers any more often then I absolutely must, but I do want to see my family and friends. I do! No, I really do. Kinda. Just not at this time of year. Let's have some get togethers at other times. It's cold, the kids are cranky, I am cranky, the sun has been down since 4 PM, and I just want to sleep. GAH! 

In the words of Sweet Brown, "Aint nobody got time for that!"

Talking about this is giving me anxiety. Want to fix this? See the previous two sections. Moving on.

BAD MUSIC

Two words: Mariah Carey.

I even like Mariah's songs. (I said what I said.) But I'm so sick of them!

Have you ever noticed how music celebrities all seem to need to have a Christmas album? It's the same few songs that you've heard a billion times, but in their voice. That's what we needed! *ugh* I like Amy Grant and all, but her extremely popular album has no soul to my ears. Some celebrities even have multiple versions of the same songs. They're not even necessarily better versions.  Looking at you, Johnny Mathis. And please do not even get me started on the Beetles members! How is it the Eurythmics of all bands makes a vastly superior song than former members of the Beetles? Give me an Andrea Bocelli, or Nat King Cole, or Michael Bublé any day over a soulless cash grab. I am sick of Frank Sinatra's Christmas songs, too, but at least he pained over every last detail.

The songs play on constant repeat starting in November and going un-paused through to January. Over and over and over and over. No, I don't want Parson Brown to marry me off. No, I don't want it to snow me in. No, I absolutely do not want to do the jingle bell rock. No, I don't ever want another blue Christmas. And no, I absolutely, positively do not ever, ever want to hear "Last Christmas" ever again in all my natural-born life. The song is about an epically bad judge of character getting into serial relationships with abusers. How is that even a Christmas song? Hans Gruber falling off the Nakatomi Tower has more to do with Christmas than that. Given those options, I would much prefer to listen to "Natty Christmas" by Jacob Miller & Ray I, featuring their transcendent "All I Want for Ismas". Lol

And don't get me started on the televised parades. Less balloons, more stars, and all of them lip-synching. Your lips are half a second off on that line, celebrity - and it's your own song! You know why that microphone is so far away from your mouth? It's because you know it doesn't matter where it is! Milli Vanilli were ruined for less.

These new Christmas songs are all about romance, it seems to me. Once again, a tradition trying to find context. I guess with snow happening less and less in many places and half the world having Christmas in summer anyway, a secular Christmas song has to be about something. Is it strange that my favorite Christmas song lately is "Christmas Wrapping" by The Waitresses? Lol

What ever happened to hymns and carols? You know, the really old songs that glorified Jesus and told the story of the nativity of our Lord and Savior? Why are those songs a hundred years old or more? Bach, we need you! Make new ones! Yes, I do want a silent night. Yes, I do wish joy to the world. Yes, I do want ye merry gentlemen to remember Christ our Savior. Yes, I do want the herald angels to sing. Read these lyrics from "I Heard The Bells On Christmas Day" (I like the Sinatra version best):

I heard the bells on Christmas day

Their old familiar carols play,

And wild and sweet the words repeat

Of peace on earth, good will to men.

I thought how, as the day had come,

The belfries of all Christendom

Had rolled along th' unbroken song

Of peace on earth, good will to men.

And in despair I bowed my head

"There is no peace on earth," I said,

"For hate is strong and mocks the song

Of peace on earth, good will to men."

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:

"God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;

The wrong shall fail, the right prevail

With peace on earth, good will to men."

THAT is a Christmas song!

I wish Christian artists would make more original, faith-based Christmas music. Good stuff, though. Not that over-produced, formulaic stuff I usually hear on K-Love.

How do we fix this one? I don't think it really needs to be fixed. People like what they like. If people like romantic Christmas songs, so be it. To each their own. I just wish there was more in the way of hymns and carols is all. Perhaps let the artists know with your dollars that you prefer a more traditional Christmas song.

SANTA

Oh, here's one that's a touchy subject for many. Jolly old Saint Coca Cola advertisement.

I did in fact study the history of Santa Claus. I put some of the things I found into the Christmas FAQ. Look in the section on Other Traditions. Did you know Santa is not pagan in origin? It's true!

The tradition started harmlessly enough. Saint Nicholas was a real saint, and for very good reasons was arguably the most popular saint of all. There were some big changes after the Protestant Reformation. The original gift-giving day was the Feast of St. Nicholas on December 6, but Reformers couldn't have us honoring saints, so they moved it to Christmas and then created gift-givers like Father Christmas, and Christkindl, and the Weihnachtsmann. (Thanks again, Martin and Henry. Just peaches, you two.) And then things went sideways. The Dutch who still liked Saint Nicholas, transformed him into a magical, flying character to entertain the children. Then into a tiny character, because he needed to fit down stove pipes. And then he was a political instrument. He was relocated from New Jerusalem to the North Pole, to spite the Confederacy. And then, right when he was about to be abandoned, along comes a Coca Cola commercial. Now, he's just completely off the rails.
I imagine the real Saint Nicholas would not be on good terms with Santa Claus. Nicholas is the guy who allegedly punched Arius in the face at the Council of Nicaea, after all. Can you imagine Saint Nicholas punching Santa Claus? I find a small amount of comfort in that thought.

Secular Christmas is more about Santa than the Savior. That's a shame. Some people balked in 1965 when Linus recited some Bible verses in the animated special "A Charlie Brown Christmas". But no one has an issue with secular Santa. Most of the Christmas movies and shows these days are about Santa. It is far easier to find decorations of Santa or Santa themes than Jesus or Nativity themes. There are more popular "modern" songs about Santa than religious themes. Is Mariah Cary dressed like Mary Theotokos? No. She's dressed like Santa. People say Santa is the reason for the season. Santa Claus has in effect replaced Jesus in secular Christmas. This saddens me.

At the risk of giving aid and comfort to the Armstrongist propaganda machine - Santa Claus has gotten painfully close to becoming an idol for some people in our modern, secular Christmas.

I am not saying Santa crosses the line for all people in all instances. I enjoy some of the Santa movies and shows. I own the Lionel Polar Express train. The trick is to keep Santa in his place. Santa is nothing more than a character, like Mickey Mouse or Totoro or Captain Kirk (or Big Beak  Lol). Imaginary characters are not in and of themselves wrong. Santa Claus is not in and of itself wrong. A healthy imagination is a good thing. Let things be fantastical and magical and wonderful and playful in your life. Just keep it in perspective.

My suggestion to fix this one? Minimize Santa. I am not advocating ditching Santa, per se. I am advocating returning Santa to the status of a friendly character. He's a fictional character. Leave it at that. Personally, I much prefer those fuzzy gnome things with the massive beards. They're adorable!

I do like this Santa, though:

CONCLUSION

Alright. I think that's just about enough complaining for one day.

Christmas. It has issues. 

The issues, it seems to me, are really complaints about the world. If Christmas had never existed, all of these things would still exist in another context. I think they are fixable over time. No, I do not agree we should ditch Christmas, nor do I agree that any of these issues make it pagan. Not at all. If problems make things pagan, I refer you to the problems in your own life, and I refer you to the issues in your own church. I say it often and I will say it again - the definition of "pagan" used in groups like Armstrongism is expansive, unworkable, shifting, and self-serving. It accuses everyone on earth, including themselves, and you could argue it even accuses Jesus Christ. It's so expansive that it defeats itself. That's why it needs to shift, you see, so the accusers can excuse themselves. I disagree!

Christmas is a wonderful time of year all the same. Not in every way. Not for everyone. But what in this world is? I hope you find some way to make this year better than last, and next year better than this.

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It is important that you understand; Everything on this blog is based on the current understanding of each author. Never take anyone's word for it, always prove it for yourself, it is your responsibility. You cannot ride someone else's coattail into the Kingdom. ; )

Acts 17:11

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