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.

                                                                                                                                                              
                                                                                                                                                              
                                                                                                                                                              

Merry Bogus Christmas

Anyone who’s ever read my blog during the Christmas season knows I consider it a bogus holiday.

Not totally bogus: Jesus was born: though almost-certainly not on the day we celebrate His birth.  Not that that's a big deal, or at all unusual.  Even as recent an event as July 2nd 1776, we celebrate on the 4th.

That God was born into the world in human flesh, and lived in this world among human beings, IS a truly big deal.  It's the most important event that ever happened, for the human race, and for our understanding of God . . . except when He willingly died an unjust human death to set human beings free from death, and sin.  Which was His reason for being born as a man.

In previous years, I've gone into the bogus history of Christmas in detail, at length.  That Christians of the first centuries didn't celebrate Christmas, for example: that Christian writers in those centuries ridiculed pagans for celebrating their gods' birthdays.

One of the major pagan "birthday" celebrations in Rome was for "Sol Invictus" ("the unconquerable Sun") on December 25th.  It also fell on the last day of Saturnalia, the great feast of the god Saturn: a period (which got longer, and more riotous, through the centuries) celebrated by giving gifts, and drinking, and decorating trees.

Both those Roman "holy-days" continued among pagans into the early years of Christianity's official status as Rome's religion.  It seems pretty clear that the invention of "Christ's Mass" in that same period was a deliberate attempt to give the people a Christian holy-day like the ones they were used to.  Even the Christianizing Emperors weren't brave enough to tell people the new religion did away with their favorite, most licentious, birthday party.

It seems significant that many of God's purifying moves for His Church since the 300s A.D. have taken direct aim at the pagan custom of Christmas.  Particularly significant for American Christians, because most of the reforming churches of our colonial ancestors considered the celebration of of Christmas (in the words of Puritan Governor William Bradford) "pagan mockery:"
 
The story of how the celebration of Christmas became resurgent, and dominant over Christianity's teaching against it, is well told in a biography of Charles Dickens, The Man Who Invented Christmas.  The title says it all.  Dicken's "A Christmas Carol" (which notably does not contain the name "Jesus," nor the title "Christ," except as an element of the words "Christian" and, especially, "Christmas") was the origin of modern Christmas: not Jesus' birth.

Many people of course have warm sentimental feelings about the Christmas season. That's obvious.  Good for them.  That is, however, not what Christmas is about, or what Christmas celebrates.  Personal sentiment has no place in validating Christian truth.

I can testify that God still speaks past, or around, the bogus sentimental religiosity of churches' "Christmas," to anyone who will listen for Him.  But I can also testify that the Christmas season is, for anyone who wants to listen to God and worship Him, the year's greatest season of Spiritual drought.  For the whole month of December (and sometimes longer), all the Church' thoughts and efforts are mostly...sometimes entirely...toward, and for, and about, the holiday.

This basic incompatibility of "Christmas" and Christianity is particularly well-illustrated this year by the churches in my area.  Several area churches (including my daughter's church, in a nearby area) have cancelled their Sunday services on the 25th...because that's Christmas day.

I don't say this to censure those folks.  In our cultural context (and our "Christian-culture" religious reinforcement of it), their decision is practical.  Many church-members will be traveling, or have a houseful of out-of-town family.  Opening all the Christmas presents takes up the whole morning.  Preparing Christmas dinner (especially for a large family) takes hours and hours of exhausting work.

It is nevertheless a telling example of core Christian purposes marginalized in favor of the purportedly-"religous" holiday.  Church-people like to chirp that "Jesus Is The Reason For The Season."  Get down to it, I have to doubt that's anything more than an empty slogan.  It's something of a real-life parable this year, that worshipping God is canceled because of Christmas.

The Hollow Days

A beloved former pastor gave a Christmas sermon one year on "the hollow days." (He credited a friend with that great phrase.)

He spoke about a real spiritual problem: the ennui and let-down many people experience at, and after, Christmas. He didn't exactly say the holiday itself was hollow. But he came as close to taking on that shibboleth as any pastor I've ever heard.

The "hollow"ness of Christmas that always stands out for me is its astounding lack of spiritual content. At least, in the Church. The world undoubtedly puts on a temporary spirit of "good will toward men:" much-needed, even if only superficial, short-lived, and merely-sentimental. But the Church is where we would expect that continuing message of God's good news to be most deeply manifest.

The opposite seems to be the case. In my experience, the Church' entire month of December, perhaps even a few weeks before and a few weeks after, is given over to the "Christmas" spirit. There is at least a month every year when my church puts on hold all of our Bible-studies, sermons, prayer-groups, worship services and all the other distinctives of a Christian church, to focus entirely on special "Christmas" festivities and presentations. It feels very much like a break from the Church' God-given work, when we can relax and join unbelievers in idolatry of the holiday.

There are of course the obligatory, usually formulaic, sermons...about the wonderfulness of Christmas. But Sunday School classes, Bible studies, prayer groups...the places where we hear God's thoughts and ways, where we approach Him and enjoy His Presence...are put on hold for Christmas activities: decorating the sanctuary, practicing the pageant, organizing, advertising, and driving forward all the Christmas events. There is never less awareness and sense of God's Real Presence in the Church than at the season we claim to celebrate His Presence among men.

I've written several times before about the false history of Christmas, its origin as an expedient for a half-pagan Church, its revival in modern times as a Christ-less sentimental narrative. A "holy-day" exactly of, and to, the world's tastes. But only the Church manifests the deep hollowness of Christmas. Only the Church can.