Audri Swisher's Blog

This week in Honors, we abandon our theme of beauty to venture into the wild world of themelessness (gasp!). So, naturally, we come to…Christmas?

In “Christmas Was Not Always Like This: A Brief History,” Bruce Forbes essentially puts the kibosh on any rosy ideas we may have had of a completely “spiritual, wholesome” Christmas of the good ol’ days. He begins, appropriately enough, with the beginnings of Christmas. In the very early church, much more emphasis was put on the death and resurrection of Christ than on his birth. When Christmas began to be celebrated, it was through a combination of pagan and Christian traditions.

The residents of early America neither practiced Christmas in a common manner nor necessarily recognized it at all. Instead of the almost across-the-board celebration of Christmas today, a “patchwork” of Christmas celebrations varied from family to family. The phenomenon as we know it today had its roots in the mid-1800s, corresponding to the development of Santa Claus and the backing of Christmas by businesses.

Forbes’s last point has to do with Christmas and gift-giving. Gifts were not a central part of early Christmas, though small gifts for children did arise for a celebration earlier in December, Saint Nicholas Day. Similarly, people gave presents on New Year’s Day. In 1800s America, the gift-giving portion for both holidays converged on Christmas, Saint Nicholas became Santa Claus, and, driven largely by business, Christmas became a dominant celebration in the United States.

Response:

I’ll respond to each of his three comments at the end of the article.

1)      “Christians need to make their peace with the fact that Christmas is partly a winter festival…expecting Christmas to be a purely spiritual celebration is a desire for something that never was” – Granted, the point is well-made. But I believe that the tables can be viciously turned. It’s unreasonable to expect Christmas to be “purely spiritual,” sure, but apparently also unreasonable to expect some to accept it as a “spiritual” holiday at all. Businesses and government fall over themselves trying to be PC and usually manage to annoy more than whom they started with.

2)      As the early America showed, meaningful Christmas celebrations can happen without everyone joining in – Again, well-made point and very true. But rather than stand by the sidelines and simply not participate, parts of the “entire culture” join in, all right – but only to dig at and aggravate any fault they can find. Christmas (at least, when it comes to religion) is “offensive”: well, so are some things on TV, but we’re told to shut it off, change the channel, stop our ears. Nativity scenes and “Merry Christmas” shove religion down our throats, but sex, violence, and bad language on daytime TV are creative expression. After all, “You don’t have to watch it!”

3)      If gift-giving has overwhelmed Christmas, it’s not the store’s fault – Commercialism dominates Christmas, as those statistics earlier showed. Well…it’s good for the economy.

My apologies for getting on my soapbox. Merry Christmas everyone!…albeit a bit early.