Christmas is an interesting time. A time when we feel the need to eat too much, spend too much, get together with family and engage with them for far longer than we would normally. And I found myself wondering…why?
Christmas is purportedly about the birth of Christ. Nowadays, there is very little in reality that celebrates that unless you attend religious services. We have Christmas trees and decorations which are becoming more and more outlandish – my husband supplies packaging to a company that decorates houses with Christmas decorations. And I can’t help but wonder…why? How and why did that tradition start and what does it have to do with the birth of Christ?
Christmas trees came about from an ancient pagan tradition celebrating life through the representation of greenery. So, nothing to do with Jesus at all though a celebration of nature which Jesus spoke about and our connection to it. And, I think, the lights are about piercing the darkness of winter. But all the baubles, tinsel, balloon arches and the rest…I really don’t know where that came from. Don’t get me wrong, I do love Christmas lights. I love seeing how people light up the outside of their houses and watching the wonder on children’s faces when they see them. But I really don’t know why we feel the need to go so over the top about it.
The legend of Santa Claus stems from a Greek legend St Nicholas providing gifts and generosity to the poor in secret, in particular dropping gold coins into the shoes of three girls as the shoes sat by the hearth thereby saving them from servitude. This happened around the 6th December feast day and this legend became the basis of the modern day Santa Claus…so, nothing directly to do with Jesus. Though, naturally, it does reflect the message from Jesus of kindness and helping those who are unable to help themselves. But, directly, absolutely no connection whatsoever.
Christmas is also a feast day, really. They are based in religious traditions which are meant to celebrate significant people and events such as the birth of Jesus. The days are meant to be as much about spiritual guidance as they are feasting, and remembering divine blessings and guidance. So, from that perspective, feast days do have something with the birth of Christ but we have lost the part, I feel, about spiritual guidance and the remembrance of divine blessings and guidance. I don’t think people actually really think about why they are feasting, just that they are driven to over-indulge.
The coming together of family and friends is, obviously, meant to be about love. The celebration of the bonds of community, of love, which is something that Jesus embodied. But Jesus also embodied the notion of connection, of all being as one. Of the creation of community but so often people dread the thought that they will ‘have to’ invite certain members of their family, see people they perhaps don’t see from one month to the next and yet are prepared to be shut in together for days without the fundamental premise of us all being integrally connected and one. I honestly do not believe that people think about Jesus’s message when they sit down to dinner with their in-laws, for example.
The celebration of Christmas is a cobbling together of pagan traditions around the winter solstice and the commemoration of the birth of Christ (which likely happened in October) as agreed at the Council of Nicaea in the fourth century. And it has been hijacked by corporate greed in the last century so the entire message of the time of year is lost. As I sat eating my Christmas meal yesterday with friends and family, I just couldn’t help but wonder why we do this if we aren’t going to recognise what the holiday was created for and what it is meant to represent. We put ourselves under inordinate pressure, we spend far too much money on food (a lot of which gets wasted) and presents, often things that people don’t really need. And we have entirely forgotten the premise of love, the end of a cycle of nature, and the basis of helping those who cannot help themselves, of a sense of community, connection and, fundamentally, of all of it being as one.
That, to me, is what Christmas should be about.
Louisa Simpson 