Sunday, December 26, 2004
Christmas is the greatest tradition in the Christian church. We don't know the date of Jesus' birth. Not only are Christians not required to believe Jesus was born on December 25th, it would be in error to believe he was born on any specific date (The essence of Christian belief is simply that Jesus is the Messiah foretold in Hebrew scripture; nearly everything else - even the exact meaning of his life - is debatable). The Nativity story appears in only one Gospel, & it is a literary add-on, & it combines a number of preexisting myths & traditions of how god-heroes are conceived & born. We're fortunate that Jesus gestated in a human female womb & wasn't regurgitated by God, or a potential omlet in a goose egg, or midwived by wood nymphs from a magic orchid. Among founders of major religions, only Siddhartha Gautama did not claim a unique relationship with the Divine; the first earthly Buddha was a seeker & discoverer, not an inventor.
The Christmas celebration at its best is wonderful theater. At its least it is window dressing. Everything else is Saturnalia & winter solstice festivities. Christmas has never existed without the latter. So I am not driven to apoplexy by the "commercialization" of the Advent season. I am bothered when references to its Christian meaning are taken out of schools, now even out of department stores. These references - the songs, the stories, the manger scenes with petting zoos, can & ought to be allowed to coexist with Hanukah, Kwanzaa (a recent creation), Santa Claus, the Grinch, Charlie Brown, It's a Wonderful Life, the Yule Log on WPIX TV, & decorated evergreen trees - a lovely northern yurrupean manifestation of the Tree of Life, which is also the Cross at Calvary & the fruit of knowledge in Eden, & even the spreading bodhi tree that invites all to sit & become enlightened.
If it somehow were authoritatively revealed through Roman & Hebrew bureaucratic paperwork that Jesus was born in June, this yearly season of lights, song & excessive spending & consumption would not end. First, most Christians would refuse to accept the evidence because we love our December Christmas too much to give it up. Second, like all religions, we're taught to accept irrational & illogical beliefs on faith even when refuted by physics, geology & anthropology, or just so fantastic that no one raised outside the church could take them as factual. But if Christmas was somewhow relocated to June - let's say by an infallible Pope with the rest of us figuring that if he buys it, we might as well go along, we would not get rid of the potlatch celebration that drives our economy & is the most important holiday on our calendar. We'd just let it become the secular event our courts, fearful elected officials, & the ACLU are pushing it toward anyway. I don't know what we'd do with "White Christmas," or "Chestnuts roasting on an open fire," or the "Bleak Midwinter" depicted in Christina Rossetti's beautiful poem, but we'd still have omniscient Santa Claus or Father Yule plus all the pagan rituals & symbols that have accrued to the Birthday of Jesus over the centuries (or were there from the beginning) & which, ironically, are now considered the non-religious, inoffensive aspects of Christmas & thus permitted to be observed & displayed in our public schools & common community spaces.
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