Here comes Christmas:
As our annual orbit of the sun approaches winter solstice, we in the Christian world celebrate the occasion as Christmas. But not without the usual griping from unhappy members of the progressive (chaotic) end of our social spectrum. They would like to do away with the festival all together.
We don't hear much about these self-appointed apologists for the Christian world this year, probably because members of our Toronto media are busy piling on mayor Rob Ford. The wild typhoon in the Philippines helped a little, too.
But back to Christmas. Christmas comes to us from early Christian strategists who thought it was a good idea to attach this festival to the traditional seasonal celebration of the Return of the Sun. Instead of sacrificing virgins, burning towering wooden effigies filled with assorted criminals, our ancestors had their wild partying toned down by Christian activists to make it more suitable for a civilized society.
In time, it became normal to celebrate the occasion by exchanging gifts, practicing good will and tolerance, feasting, indulging in holiday spirits and doing our best to behave and be nice. We do all this to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, who was offered as the ultimate role model for how all good Christians ought to behave.
It doesn't really matter when Jesus Christ was born. Dec. 25 is when we celebrate his birthday. It's all part of a purpose, and the purpose is a good one. It focuses our behavior on a peaceful community, and that is what religion should be all about, should it not?
That is why, instead of picking fault, we should defend the celebration of Christmas. It really is about peace and good will. We should all look forward to Christmas as a festival where we can briefly forget about the bumps in our personal pathways through life and concentrate on getting together with family and friends for a bit of holiday cheer, good food and good will. That is far more important than the gifts and the holiday glitz, but those are an important part of this festival as well.
There's nothing wrong with giving and receiving things we want or need. Christmas mythology says that practice was started by the three wise men presenting their gifts to the baby Jesus. It was perpetuated by an early Saint Nicholas who is alleged to have slipped gold coins into the footwear of girls in needy families to fatten up their dowries. Apparently, back then, it wasn't easy to marry off daughters without a bribe.
In today's social consciousness, an old guy slipping coins to young girls in the night would probably be seen as a potential child molester and be taken to task by some politically-appointed human rights tribunal. Still, Nicholas was seen as a saint with ideas beneficial to the community in the silly old social consciousness of the early Christian era.
The business of giving was reinforced in an insightful story by Charles Dickens about an old miser who valued wealth above all else. It was further enhanced in America in a nicely crafted poem about a fat little elf arriving in a miniature sleigh towed by eight tiny reindeer and descending down a chimney with a bag full of goodies for the children.
Of course, today's Santa Claus is no longer a fat little elf catering to small people. Like almost everyone else on this continent, he has grown to enormous proportions.
Instead of celebrating this aspect of the holiday as an opportunity to show people we love and care for that we love them and care for them, the people in our society who appear to harbor very limited capacity for peace and good will dismiss it all as nothing more than a commercial operation propelled by greed.
It is that, too, but is that so bad? Thousands of Ma and Pa businesses everywhere in the Christian world survive only because someone out there buys their goodies at Christmas time. Without that, they would have to fold and probably go on the dole. Millions of people are kept employed manufacturing things we don't necessarily need, but which we buy anyway on this occasion.
Without Christmas, about 80 percent of the Arts and Crafts industry would be wiped out and the chocolate supply network would undergo massive layoffs. Thriving evergreen tree farms and poinsettia nurseries would go out of business.
Giving the people in the northern hemisphere where it all began something to anticipate at the onset of the darkest days of the year indicates a clear grasp of the vagaries of human nature by the early Christian spin doctors. Instead of reducing our activities to cower in our hovels near the fire behind shuttered windows as the days grow progressively shorter, colder and darker, the Christian take on the festival of the winter solstice gives us something to look forward to.
Lighting candles and stringing up lights everywhere gives participants the feeling that they are actually doing something to ward off the gathering gloom. Symbolically, it provides the opportunity for us to dispel the onset of darkness by lighting a small candle or a string of lights.
We do not know for sure if this is where the sage advice, "Rather than curse the dark, light a small candle" came from, but there should be no surprise if it did.
