Feeling Free To Leave Christmas to Others

Over the last ten, or so, years of my life, I have grown increasingly impatient with the tradition called "Christmas". I felt emotionally blackmailed to participate and help provide the intricate rituals and expensive trappings. Out of a sense of doing what was "right for the family", I'd put in long hours putting up decorations and shopping myself into months of debt.

I'd feel obligated to grimace my way through seemingly endless get-togethers of "spirit-filled" (an ironic term in itself - considering the amount of libation that tends to flow during the holidays) party-people, who sharply defined hypocrisy in their pretense of "Christian Love" which conveniently seemed only to last for the few hours they had to be at the party. There was a robot-like quality in the way I lock-stepped through so many winters, in observance of a tradition that became more dubious to me with each passing year.

Always there was the guilt-enforced motivation that said I mustn't be against Christmas, because, after all - they even have names and stereotypes to label people who don't like Christmas, right? Heck, I certainly didn't want to be the "Grinch" of the family, or the "Scrooge" of the office - who would?

Until the last very few years, I've continued to participate in the rituals - this year I'm down to just sending a card or two, and giving one or two gifts to people I love. I made one concession to the whole "decoration" bit - a simple wreath on the door. That's it. One day soon I will probably end up not observing Christmas at all, but old habits die hard.

I recently started reading about where this supposedly "holy" day originated, and what I've discovered will make it very much easier for me to let go of the whole Christmas thing.

By a lot of accounts, Christmas misses the true birthday of Christ by a long shot. By citing references made in the bible and other research, different people have placed the birth in March, April and even September, but they agree that a Winter birth was unlikely.

http://www.new-life.net/chrtms10.htm

Truth is, early Christians didn't hold much store in celebrating the birth of anyone - especially Christ - there was a celebration of his death and his resurrection, but that "birth" stuff was added later.

But it isn't any quibbling about birthdays that gives me confidence in the correctness of my desire to let go the Christmas tradition. Its where the damn thing got its real origin.

It seems that Roman pagans first introduced the holiday of Saturnalia, a week long period of lawlessness celebrated between December 17-25. During this period, Roman courts were closed, and Roman law dictated that no one could be punished for damaging property or injuring people during the weeklong celebration.

The festival began when Roman authorities chose "an enemy of the Roman people" to represent the "Lord of Misrule." Each Roman community selected a victim whom they forced to indulge in food and other physical pleasures throughout the week. At the festival's conclusion, December 25th, Roman authorities believed they were destroying the forces of darkness by brutally murdering this innocent man or woman.

In the 4th century CE, Christianity imported the Saturnalia festival hoping to take the pagan masses in with it. Christian leaders succeeded in converting to Christianity large numbers of pagans by promising them that they could continue to celebrate the Saturnalia as Christians.
The problem was that there was nothing "Christian" about Saturnalia. To remedy this, these Christian leaders named Saturnalia's concluding day, December 25th, to be Jesus' birthday.

Christians didn't refine the practice of Saturnalia much. The earliest Christmas holidays were celebrated by drinking, sexual indulgence, singing naked in the streets (a precursor of modern caroling), etc.

http://ancienthistory.about.com/od/saturnalia/
http://www.historychannel.com/exhibits/holidays/christmas/real2.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturnalia

Pagans had long worshipped trees in the forest, or brought them into their homes and decorated them, and this observance was adopted and painted with a Christian veneer by the Church.

In pre-Christian Rome, the emperors compelled their most despised citizens to bring offerings and gifts during the Saturnalia. Later, this ritual expanded to include gift-giving among the general populace. The Catholic Church gave this custom a Christian flavor by re-rooting it in the supposed gift-giving of Saint Nicholas.

So, there you have it. The whole thing started in Rome as an ugly, self-indulgent and depraved fest. All the voodoo about it being some kind of celebration of the birth of Jesus was added on later, to conceal some of the ugliness.

I doubt that this little history lesson of mine will give pause to those hopelessly brainwashed and in thrall to the "Christmas Season". And doubtless some of those who constantly search for ways to bash Christians will try to use this as more evidence that Christians themselves are bad, etc. But I wrote this to explain why I am feeling more and more willing, as time goes by, to leave "Christmas" to others.