Christmas & Christians

'Tis the season, oh, 'tis the season.

I love Christmas. I love my family's 12 foot Christmas tree (recently scaled down due to moving), Handel's 'Messiah' and all other glorious music, and of course all the presents - those that I greedily accept and connivingly conspire to give.

I also love Christmas because it gives the community of Christians a self-accepted period of the year to remember Christ's birth - even though he was born during roughly the same time period in which he was crucified. Though since most Christians are self-delude snipes of a ridiculously transparent nature, not much of a shock there. Since I believe every day is a day to remember the death and resurrection, I've never really considered the day as "the day" to be all that important. But, rather cool that there is a conscious idea to focus attention on Christ's birth specifically. Anything that gets the community of the church to focus on Christ instead of itself is wonderful thing. However, there are two things that upset me about the season.

First, the non-Christian or secular or atheist response to "Christmas." I have no affinity or love for Christmas as a Christian 'holiday.' It's not. So I don't celebrate it as such. I'm not sure I would even consider Christmas to be a church holiday. It's largely and primarily, I would argue, a social holiday - a day in which communities/churches originally gathered to celebrate Christ's birth (and announce in the face of the pagan's Winter Solstice). As communities changed so, too, did the celebration change. Consider how society has changed, we now have numerous religious and non-religious marks for the season - logically introducing "Happy Holidays" instead of and beside "Merry Christmas." That said, it makes me sad that there seems to be a prohibition against the word and symbols associated with Christmas as a "Christian" holiday. I have forever been saddened by attempts to restrict free speech in order to preserve, or supposedly preserve,....not offending anyone. (Think of Dogbert: "You're insensitive to my insensitivity!") It's like people think Christmas has something to do with Christ. Sadly, too many do. While I understand attempts to remove "Christmas" and Christmas religious symbols from the public landscape, such still rankles me. I enjoy saying "Merry Christmas" because of it's social construction and social meaning. It's not the equivalent of saying "God bless." However, I get that most people, even in passing, equate Christmas with Christ's birth. So I suppose it's not the ACLU/atheists/ect. that piss me off, it's stupid Christians. Which brings me to my second point.

The second is like unto the first. As I dislike attempts to remove words from our lexicon, I dislike attempts by Christians to define Christmas by Christ - the demands to remove the world from Christmas. To put it bluntly, Christ is my Lord, my God and established one day and one day only to be set aside: Sunday. It was the church (little 'C') who constructed celebrations on December 25th (without Biblical precedence) and even Easter (with Biblical precedence), the church alone. By that, what loyalty and need possesses me to define a socially important day as a religiously important day? None, whatsoever. Of course, for me, social leads to religion; but such a bridge is not an IFF statement. (IFF being a mathematical logic statement which literally means "If and only if." ) Individually, I associate but do not define my social need with my religious desire. In the most extreme way of expressing this point, attending a Christmas party is as "socially important" as attending a special, non-Sabbath gathering of the church ('cause I would so totally only attend a party with people I considered worthy of my time and effort).

All that said, it was this article about churches closing on Christmas day that inspired these thoughts. Not so bad, eh? It's a little weirding, I must confess, because this year Christmas lands on a Sunday. Above I looked at two extremes regarding the Christmas season - both positions intrinsically associating Christmas with Christ. (Note: I'm not arguing that Christmas isn't by definition linked with Christ. It is. I'm just saying the link is...completely wrong.) Now there is another extreme that is, I don't know, frightening. These churches are closing on Sunday, the 25th, with most holding Christmas eve services. Can someone explain the logic of that to me? Ignore THE day of worship, substitute another, all for the sake of a socially important day of family and community. Now, if churches were simply a business, the logic of these actions would make imminent sense - the church and all those involved in running it deserve a break. And yet, churches are not businesses. They are (or should be, goodness knows they, by and large, are not!) the very definition of family and communion.

...I think I'm arguing something completely fruitless. Most churches, bar a few, probably all, are not communities and are not families. They exist to make a profit and evagelize (whatever that means in today's Christian-speak). And if they are not apart from the world, why should they not take part of it? Why not?

To take a line from Robert Ballard, the explorer who discovered the Titanic and said, "It hit an iceberg and it sank. Get over it".....
"There is no Christ in Christmas. Get over it."