Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas! Uh… No, that’s not right,
Happy Nativity! Oh, I mean,
Happy Holidays! Shit, um…,
Season’s Greetings!
Why has it become so hard to express the joy of this season, the celebration of life and redemption in the midst of winter’s death and forsakenness? I recently read an evangelical tract (I know not why?) that disputes the use of the phrase, “Merry Christmas,” because “Merry” meaning “joyful” should never be coupled with “Cristes Maesse,” literally the liturgical memorial of Christ’s atoning death on the Cross. The writer considers it perverse to celebrate Christ’s death with fanfare. He is quite right, of course, that is why the mood of Good Friday is so disconsonant with that of Easter Sunday.
Nevertheless, he misses a poignant fact: “Merry” doesn’t only connote joyousness and jubilation, contextually it also means “blessed” or “peaceful”. He also ignores the fact that the “Mass” memorializes Christ’s atoning sacrifice everyday of the year and the singular moment within the “Mass” wherein the Eucharist is consecrated and the Sacrifice of Christ is memorialized (and in Roman theology, also participates in the once-for-all, yet eternal Sacrifice of Christ) is one of solemn thanksgiving and somber reflection. It is otherwise distinct from the tone and mood of the liturgy, only Good Friday’s liturgy entirely encompasses the mood of the Sacrifice of Christ.
When we say, “Merry Christmas,” we are essentially saying, “Have a blessed (and joyful) ritual celebration of Christ’s Birth”. This, however, leads to another problem. Christmas, Chanukah, and the more recent (and somewhat artificial) Kwanzaa have been integrated by our secular culture into the “Winter Holidays”! It has become politically-correct to substitute exclusive greetings, like “Merry Christmas” and “Happy Chanukah,” with more inclusive one’s like, “Happy Holidays”.
This seems a little disingenuous to me, since those celebrating their respective holidays are unlikely to rejoice in the diminishing effect of lumping these celebrations into a large amorphous blob of gelatinous goo. I also think it is slightly absurd to use “Happy Holidays” as a secular alternative to more exclusive greetings, since those insisting upon the usage are unlikely to sympathize with the concept of festival “holy days” to begin with.
On the other hand, ‘Season’s Greetings,” is a salutation so bereft of substance and meaning as to be laughable. I could just as easily use it any other day of the year with the same effect, it is no better than “Hello”.
Why is it so hard for people to admit that they are celebrating something? If Christ is the center of your festal holiday, tell people what you are celebrating: the Incarnation of God; the Nativity of our Lord and Saviour; Emmanuel, God Amongst Us. It is irrelevant whether the people you greet with your own well-wishing and blessing are joining you or not.
If you are celebrating the rededication of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, then the consequence of your enthusiasm should be reminding people why you are lighting those candles.
If you are celebrating your African-American heritage and culture, the Nguzu Saba communal philosophy; then make sure people know why you are proud of the values of unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity, and faith.
No one should be harried and heckled into pretending they don’t believe or value something by whitewashing it with so-called politically correct alternatives. It isn’t politically correct, it is a massive political error to disrespect people by expecting them to temper their celebration by self-censorship. You don’t need to agree with them, just let them be, and appreciate their right to celebrate their heritage, tradition, and faith.
And another thing, I am so tired of hearing how Christmas is a celebration of the most heinous pagan practices of antiquity. Don’t put up a Christmas tree because it represents the Asherah pole; or Jeremiah reminds us that “[l]ike a scarecrow in a melon patch, their idols cannot speak; they must be carried because they cannot walk”; or the pagan use of evergreen to represent the triumph of life over death. As far as I am concerned, the widespread use of evergreen to symbolize the triumph of life over death (in Egypt, Rome, Ancient Britain, Scandinavia, and the Germanies) is worthily appropriated by Christians whose incarnate God is truly the triumph of life over death. Deck the halls with boughs of holly, garlands of bay, swags of boxwood, and branches of yew. There aren’t very many commonly-occurring natural symbols that speak to this central Christian truth as effectively as evergreen.
The celebration of Christmas during the winter solstice also makes perfect sense, our intuition has always been to celebrate life in the midst of the depressing conditions of winter. To redeem the ubiquitous winter festivals with a reminder that God became incarnate to free the world from the death symbolized by the season is only appropriate. It doesn’t matter when Christ was born, only that we celebrate his birth and incarnation.
Oh, and:
- Mistletoe represents licentiousness and Saturnalian drunken sex orgies
- Gingerbread men connote human sacrifice and cannibalism
- Gift-giving has its source it the tyrannical coercion of citizens to make offerings to the Roman Emperors during Saturnalia and Kalends
- Santa Claus is an amalgam of Saint Nicholas, an anti-Semitic fourth-century eastern bishop; Pasqua Epiphania, the female boon-giving deity of Bari; and the white-bearded Woden of the German/Celtic pantheon
- By celebrating Christmas we consent to the historic ritual sacrifice of children to Kronos, Saturn, Nimrod, Baal, and Moloch, that took place on this date in antiquity; it’s as bad as rebranding Hitler’s Birthday, April 20ᵗʰ, as a celebration of the German Nation!
- Yule logs are a burnt-offering in worship of the sun-god Mithras, on Yule (also Brumalia) on December 25
Today, I kiss whomever might be under the mistletoe with me, invoking pagan fertility cults and fornicating on the spot in a sweaty, drunken craze. Oh, and of course I’m a cannibal since I enjoy human-shaped cookies. Saint Nicholas never gave gifts to children before he spiritually married an Italian goddess and Eastern Christians didn’t have beards, only Woden could give Santa Claus that. And each Christmas I hang a basket on my Christmas tree and burn an aborted fetus as a sacrifice to Nimrod. And when I place a log on the fire it’s done just as I bow down to the rebirth of the sun.
The response to this absurdity was best articulated by Tolkien and C.S. Lewis in the 1930s, a philosophical/theological concept known as Mythopoeia. It is essentially a defense of creative non-allegorical myth-making, but the practical effect that it has is in liberating pre-Christian history and culture in a concrete way. Christianity (and Judaism for that matter) have always implicitly licensed the adoption/adaptation of non-Judeo-Christian traditions.
When Paul preaches to the pagan Athenians at the Areopagus (the hill where the judges once sat) he appeals by using a well-known line from a poem by Aratus, with whom the Greeks would have been well acquainted. Paul uses a pagan author and pagan ideas to instruct the Athenians about Christianity. In Titus 1:12, he quotes Epimenides and in 1 Corinthians 15:33 he quotes from Euripides, a tragedian. Augustines dependance on Platonism is well-known and Aquinas’ synthesis of Greek Aristotelianism, Islamic Averroism, and the pre-Scholastic Platonism of post-Nicene Christian thought is some of the finest to be found.
The point is, that according to Mythopoeia: Since man is created in the Image of a Creator, his creative powers have but one Source and though he is fallen, yet the vestige of God’s likeness is found in fragments of that original perfection which man now only rudely resembles. For the Christian, the gentile is but a man possessed of a soul, who for better or for worse in made after the likeness of God and can do nothing other than create myth. According to Tolkien, God has written the only true myth and he wrote it in the flesh and blood of his only begotten son, Christ. Paganism does not have as its father, Satan only; but the remains of that God that shaped us from the clay of Paradise. It is therefore not entirely misguided to renew that which is broken and restore the missing pieces that God has supplied us with in Christ.
We celebrate Christmas — with all of its myriad traditions sourced from who knows where — as the incarnation of Christ by which creation, especially man and all that is of man, is cleansed by baptismal ablutions and made new and complete. It is no sin to accept the collective intuition of fallen man and enlighten it with the truth revealed in Christ. In this way, Christ is not absorbed into sun-worship, but rather inverts the old religion and says, “I am the light, the light of which this symbol speaks”. The sun — which is finite — does not literally lie dead throughout Advent and is not literally reborn each December 25th, but is it not appropriate that God’s absence and Christ’s birth should be celebrated at that moment when the sun seems dead and when it is reborn, now as an infinite and all-enduring light illuminating the earth that it might set it free from the two-fold darkness of sin and ignorance? Nature can be for us a symbol, but there is no special über-Christian Nature that replaces that which has been since the dawn of time. We share Creation with the pagans that preceded us and those that walk beside us today. We are all equipped with the very same gifts, which perceive a sign and a symbol in the handiwork of God.
