Why I Hate Christmas

                                                                                                                                                              
                                                                                                                                                              
                                                                                                                                                              

I've blogged numerous times, in great historical detail, about the hateful falseness of Christmas.

I'm really not all that angry at what secular society does to Christmas.  "Monetizing" everything from which a dollar may be wrung is exactly what we know mercantilism does.  And Christmas offers the opportunity for many dollars: the most dollars, in fact, of the entire business-year.

So of course Christmas is the most commercial event of every year.  I don't think secular business intends any sacrilege by that fact.  Their selling-point is less the "religion" of the holiday, than its sentimentality: sentimentality sells with Muslims, Jews, and unbelievers...sizable, and often wealthy, demographics...as much as with Christians.

Sentimentality was the selling-point of Christmas in Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," arguably the kick-off of what we'd recognize as our modern "Christmas."  No surprise that the year after its publication a clever London stationer began selling the first Christmas cards.  No surprise Americans (whose business, Calvin Coolidge said, is business) pushed the commercial possibilities of the holiday vastly further.  No surprise that even countries of negligible Christianity, such as Japan, took the heavily-monetized American holiday to their business hearts.

I don't resent what the secular world has done with Christmas.  There's an almost-innocent frankness in their love love for Christmas because they love money, big money, in their pockets.  I'll take an honest atheist any day over a pious hypocrite.  And the church' Christmas has always been very hypocritical.

First of all that Christmas is "the great Christian celebration:"  The distinctive Christian celebration of Jesus' resurrection is, and always has been, our greatest celebration.  And despite the semi-clever slogan about "putting Christ back in Christmas," the gospel narratives of Jesus' birth are the only Christ-truth in Christmas.  After the 20 minutes it takes to read the gospel stories, everything else that fills our 12, or 30, or 90 days of Christmas is (Biblical term here, Philippians 3:8) dung.

That's everything back to and including the reason Christmas was invented by the Roman church of Constantine's time, and the day they chose for its celebration.  No need to again go into the long history of "religious" sham in Christmas.  And no reason not to say I hate all the pious fraud of the "religious" holiday: God said so first.

“I hate, I reject your festivals,
Nor do I delight in your solemn assemblies."  (Amos 5:21; see also Isaiah 1:14).

The history of Christmas shows the holiday has always been "your" (humanly-contrived) "festival" and "solemn assembly"...not God's.

But more and more, the reasons I hate Christmas are less academic, historical, and philosophical.  More about the church' practice of Christmas.

Last year I blogged my bemusement that a local church cancelled their Sunday worship-service on December 25th because it interfered with their Christmas program.  Same way, every "Christmas season" my own believing church always suspends our Sunday School classes and Bible study for a film-series and discussions about Christmas. 

And it's an open secret that the spiritual life of believers...prayer, reading scripture, meditating, whatever...is largely put on hold for participation in their church' special Christmas activities, and non-church Christmas demands on their lives.  (And that for those who don't have much of any other, participation in their church' special Christmas activities is often their major "spiritual life" of the year.)

The reasons I most hate Christmas most are that for many Christians it takes precedence over Christianity, its real worship, and its real-life practice.

That seems to be the reason God hates our "religious" holidays too.