Christmas
It’s been a while since I have written on here. Life has been pretty busy with work, school, colds and aches…
This week I went to Manchester to visit my Aunt and Uncle with my brother. It was a lot of fun and good to see them as I’m not often able to.
While I was there I got a lot of reading material. I bought a few magazines and got some books, mostly things that aren’t useful whatsoever to my course, but are fun or useful elsewhere.
Anyways, about Christmas… I was asked to lead a RUSH night at church about Christmas because “it isn’t in the Bible” (coulda fooled me!). But really the idea was about where Christmas came from and all the traditions and guff we have around Christmas. The date it is on, the decorations, the food, the gifts, all that stuff.
So I got right onto Wikipedia and most of my research stayed within the bounds of wikipedia, delving into various articles here and there. Now I know that it’s not the most reliable of sources, but lets be honest there are going to be so many mixed up and meddled with storied about Christmas tradition that it is as good a place as any to start from.
One of the things that I really realised from looking into it is that, while Christmas and it’s various traditions may not have much grounding in Christianity, they are a good thing to have. Ultimately the meaning behind these traditions has been lost and replaced time after time after time. No one burns a Yule log for Thor, no one erects a Christmas tree in pagan thanks for the wood for the fire, no one is having a festival on the 25th in honour of sun gods/goddesses not being defeated by the winter and starting to make the days longer again…
Ultimately all of these traditions gain for each of us the meaning that we learn to associate with them. The star on the tree represents the guiding star over the stable, the log is turned into an advent log with candles to await the celebration of Christ’s coming at Christmas, the date means that we have time to have a warm and heartfelt family celebration and a break in the midst of a long and cold winter (at least for us in the northern hemisphere it does!).
The traditions surrounding Christmas become what we make them, already advertising has taken Father Christmas on board and has made him their own, so lets us do the same with our traditions, lets use them to remind us of the wonderful gift given to the world in Jesus Christ and not moan about how commercial it is, or let mental fundamentalists ruin it by condemn our “pagan” rituals, but lets focus on Christ and celebrating his comingfor our sake. Eh?
