Christmas: Naughty or Nice?

Christmas: Naughty or Nice?

Two Reactions

Around Christmas time, I usually encounter two different attitudes from Christians with respect to the holiday. Some look down on Christmas as a celebration growing out of pagan practice and therefore refuse to participate. The Puritans were well-known for this outlook, and it continues in certain quarters today among separatist-minded believers and independent churches. Others celebrate it with gusto, taking a great deal of comfort from it while lashing out at the crass commercialism that threatens it. Here the sentiment seems more at home among Christians in mainline or broadly evangelical churches.

I recently finished reading Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, written in 1912 by Clement A. Miles. The book is a detailed look at Christmas and its development and how the church has responded to Christmas at various times in its history. The book has offered me an opportunity to reflect on the two attitudes described above, both of which are somewhat out of balance and fail to grasp the complete historical picture of Christmas.

Is Jesus the Reason for the Season?

Among those who look to Christmas as the high point of the Christian year, you often find the popular idea that “Jesus is the Reason for the Season.” Anything then that attacks the Christian meaning in Christmas is the enemy. There seems to be an implicit belief in this view that the church, at one time in the past, established Christmas independently to celebrate Jesus’ birth, and now in recent times, Jesus has been arbitrarily removed by the secular culture. Jesus’ removal is seen in the abbreviation “Xmas,” or the bland “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” on greeting cards, or the excessive commercialism and entertainment associated with the season.

This view has a long pedigree. Around 1400 a monk Alsso of Brevnov, laments the perversion of Christmas practices. Instead of presents being given as a symbol of the gift of Jesus to humanity, they are given because if one doesn’t give, he will be unlucky in the new year. Instead of money being given freely to the poor, it is given in the hopes of securing wealth in the coming year. Alsso grieves the loss of Christian meaning in these rituals. But as Miles points out in his book, “there can be little doubt that precisely the opposite was the case—the Christian symbolism was merely a gloss upon pagan practices.” (pg. 141)

In order to understand Miles' comment, one must recognize that Christmas didn’t develop independently. Many of the customs surrounding Christmas derive from other festivals, notably the Roman celebration of the New Year called Kalends. The Greek sophist Libanilus describes the festival: “The impulse to spend seizes everyone. He who the whole year through has taken pleasure in saving and piling up his pence, becomes suddenly extravagant. He who erstwhile was accustomed and preferred to live poorly, now at this feast enjoys himself as much as his means will allow…. People are not only generous towards themselves, but also towards their fellow men. A stream of presents pours itself out on all sides.” (pg. 129) Additionally at Kalends, homes were often decked with greenery, which perhaps played into the development of the Christmas Tree, found first in Germany in the early 17th century.

Christmas itself was first celebrated on December 25th by the church in Rome in the 4th century. The date itself, of course, is not the actual day of our Lord’s birth, but may have been chosen by the church to replace the pagan festival commemorating the return of the sun at the winter solstice. Miles asks what could be more natural than the church choosing “this day to celebrate the rising of the Sun of Righteousness with healing in his wings, that she should strive thus to draw away to His worship some adorers of the god whose symbol and representative was the earthly sun.” (pg. 8)

Given that Christmas and the Kalends were celebrated near the same time, the excesses of Kalends began to make their way into Christmas. Over time a variety of superstitions from many cultures found their way into the melting pot of Christmas. There were many popular folk festivals from the November harvest all the way through the New Year that contributed in some way to Christmas as we know it today. Christmas is not a pure, isolated event. If anything, history shows that pagans have the greater claim to be upset with the church for perverting its practices than the other way around. Gift giving, for example, in pagan practice, was meant to bring favor in the New Year. Gifts of coins were good luck tokens so that the year would continue as it began—with wealth. Only later did the church associate gifts with God’s great gift of the incarnation.

A Christian with a high view of Christmas is free to bring his or her meaning to Christmas. We are free to reflect on the incarnation as the gospels do in their opening pages. But it seems misguided to allow oneself to invest too much significance in the holiday. The future of the kingdom of God does not depend on a secular culture putting Jesus back into Christmas. The world will go on being the world with all of its excess and rebellion against God. We may rightly bemoan this state of affairs, but it’s not a new or surprising development. Far more significant to the future of God’s kingdom is the everyday fruitfulness of God’s people as they focus on the Christmas virtues of love and generosity every day of the year.

Is Paganism the Reason for the Season?

Given the pagan backdrop to many Christmas practices, some have taken the opposite approach to the holiday, refusing to participate in any way. As far back as the 6th century, Caesarius of Aries spoke out against the Roman Kalends and its influence upon the church at Christmas: “On those days, the heathen, reversing the order of things, dress themselves up in indecent deformities….These miserable men, and what is worse, some who have been baptized, put on counterfeit forms and monstrous faces, at which one should rather be ashamed and sad.” (pg. 130) The writer goes on to lament gift giving, with its emphasis on securing wealth in the New Year and feasting, which often led to gluttony, immorality, and drunkenness. Responding to these abuses, the church declared a public fast during the Kalends. To participate in these activities was to share in the pagans’ sin.

Protestants also reacted against many superstitions that developed around Christmas among everyday Christian people. In Germany for example, “cradle rocking” became quite popular in the 14th century where an actual cradle with a figure of the Christ-child was rocked, allowing the worshipper to express devotion to the baby Jesus. In Upper Austria, a wooden figure of the Christ-child would be passed throughout the congregation, where each member kissed it reverently and passed it on throughout the church.

According to some observers, the problem with such traditions is that they never take us to the cross. (pg. 77) The babe never grows up. It’s easy to revere a child on a sentimental level for its cuteness. He is more like a universal little brother than the savior of the world. There are paternal instincts that come into play, exciting one’s love for the babe. But the central message of sin and redemption isn’t made explicit with such customs. The focus is wrong. In the Puritan critique of Christmas, to focus on a particular holy season was also wrong. There were no holy days; instead, the Lord’s Day worship on Sunday was itself a holy day. To set Christmas apart as a special time meant that people would mistakenly come to believe that they could honor God by observing Christmas while ignoring the significance of weekly worship.

The question to answer then is whether or not Christmas is so compromised with paganism and superstition that it should be avoided. Although it may be easier, in an effort to avoid all appearance of compromise, to cast aside Christmas, a more nuanced view is possible. In the development of Christmas, there are two streams that flow forward in time. There is the pagan stream with festivals like the Roman Kalends. As this stream moves forward in time, it picks up many other rituals from various folk religions—anything from Christmas trees to setting out food on the table for Santa Claus. Then there is the Church stream, which has established seasons like Advent and Christmas to focus on the incarnation during times of worship. Advent, leading up to Christmas Day, focuses on the coming of the Messiah, utilizing Old Testament prophetic texts that call for repentance and preparation. Christmas services themselves often focus on lessons from early in the gospels that tell of Jesus’ birth and the fulfillment of God’s promises to the world.

The tension for Christians is found in that these two streams have poured into each other, forming a river that is now modern Christmas. For some, the pagan stream has polluted the church stream and so the whole river is avoided. But why should Christians abandon the great worship resources developed by the church over the years simply because the pagan stream also influenced Christmas? Should we give up singing profound Christmas hymns simply because Santa Claus is at the mall? Should we give up Advent-themed worship with its biblical calls to repentance and waiting because there is a danger that some will be tempted to covet and overspend on Christmas gifts? For Christians to abandon their own liturgical heritage surrounding Christmas is to be defeated by the pagan stream.

Other questions feed into this tension. For example, why did the church establish a Christmas stream to begin with? The church has no mandate in scripture to observe Christmas, so why is it emphasized at all? This question moves us into larger debates about the use of a church calendar, but suffice it to say here, every pastor establishes preaching texts and themes for the year. It seems hard to argue with the practice of picking scriptures that emphasize the incarnation once a year during a focused time. The announcement of Immanuel, God with us, is the biggest news the world has ever heard. It is appropriate for churches to order worship around this theme and sing songs reflective of the hope proclaimed in the opening chapters of the gospels.

With regard to the pagan stream, some wonder how far Christians may practice activities that arise specifically from paganism. For example, the setting out of food on Christmas Eve seems to have developed from the pagan notion of feeding one’s dead ancestors, who would return at the turning of the year. Feasting, and especially the use of ham for the Christmas dinner, probably developed from the Novemeber harvest festivals, where pigs were often the sacrificial animal of choice. Can a Christian practices these traditions without being polluted by them?

Surveying these rituals in his book, Miles makes an important observation: “The denigration of [pagan] religious rites into mere play, is, indeed, as we have seen, a process illustrated by the whole history of Christmas.” (pg. 225) In other words, whatever beliefs may have at one time been associated with particular pagan rituals, they have been emptied of meaning over time as Christmas has absorbed them. In other words, the church stream has also had a sanctifying influence on the pagan stream. As the church took over certain rituals and gave them new meaning, the older pagan associations simply vanished. With the exception perhaps of some pagan revivalists, nobody believes anymore that a Christmas tree has sacramental overtones where the tree imparts some of its life-giving spirit to the household. Instead, the evergreen seems an appropriate symbol for Christmas—that in the barrenness of the world, there is still life and hope for a future fruitfulness through the Messiah.

Individual Christians would do well to strike a balanced approach to the holiday. It’s naïve and overly optimistic to hope that the world will somehow restore Jesus to the center of a season that developed along several fronts, the church being only one among many. Miles’ book is helpful for pointing out that Christmas speaks to a universal hope found in the human heart for something better; it is trans-religious in a sense. But that doesn’t mean that Christians can’t profit from Christmas either. The church knows that the world’s only hope for peace is found in the incarnation. Why not celebrate in worship what the New Testament affirms: “the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.”