Christmas: To The Roots

To hear Bill O'Reilly (a jerk) speak about how "Christmas is under attack," and "liberals are trying to take the Christ out of Christmas," you'd think that Christ had something to do with Christmas in the first place. I don't want to spend a lot of time on this, but the barest minimum of research will teach you that early Christian missionaries had a choice in dealing with popular solstice celebrations. They could either suppress them or put a veneer of Christianity on top of them and let the celebration continue. Wisely (for them) they chose the latter. The perception of Christmas today reflects that thin veneer. Merely scratch the surface however, and it becomes apparent that most Christmas traditions are decidedly un-Christian. This holiday is a holiday celebrated with gluttony and excess in all forms. To be honest, that's pretty much it, and that's what has persisted. Just look at the mall for proof.

Going back to O'Reilly's comment, I think it's true that a lot of people are trying to take "Christ out of Christmas," but I think that people who are actively trying to do such a thing think of it more as "getting Christ back out of Christmas." At the same time, I think the growing and rapidly accelerating departure of Christmas, at least in America from Christianity is less an intentional agenda and more a natural progression of a holiday, which has been exceptionally hard for the Church to Christianize, back to its roots. Shoddy religion symbolism irritates me, particularly that which relies on an english sun/son pun. The fact that a lot of Christmas parades and Christmas paegents have become "winter festivals" under the guise of sensitivity to other religions screams their pagan origins openly.

We Americans are northern hemispheric people, and we feel the same undefined desire to celebrate the corner of the year as those who came before us in the dark, cold winters. Maybe the departure of Christ from Christmas has been inevitable ever since they slapped him on it in the first place. The fact of the matter is that Christmas is a not-so-important Christian holiday. Easter is far more important and compelling. Maybe Christ never really had anything to offer for Christmas in the first place.

I will even admit that O'Reilly is partly right about Christmas being under attack. It is, but that's because all religious expression is under attack from a source I didn't even think of until it hit me over the head. Atheists have their own fundamentalists, and I think that they're equally as dangerous as the Christian, Muslim and Jewish fundamentalists we're accustomed to dealing with.