Thinking About Christmas?

AT THIS time of year people can hardly help but think about Christmas. Despite the holiday’s merriment and festivity, some of one’s thoughts are likely to be disturbing. They are disturbing because of the things that often take place on a day Christendom has set aside to honor Christ.

Yes, it causes many persons to wonder when they see so many things practiced at Christmastime that Christ condemned. For example, drunkenness, rowdiness, gluttony and other forms of immoderate behavior—these things dishonor Christ. Not only are such things deeply disturbing to thinking persons but one wonders, too, about the financial, physical and mental exhaustion that so often afflicts Christmas celebrants. The hectic struggle to purchase presents, the busy task to decorate tree and home, and the herculean efforts to send out holiday greeting cards are causing people to wonder why Christmas is as it is.

Something else provokes thought: Santa Claus’ receiving greater attention than Christ. A heathen visiting Christendom at Christmastime would likely think that Santa Claus was the central figure of the celebration. What would Christ say if he were on earth to comment about Christmas? one wonders. Would he even know that the day was ostensibly set aside to honor him? From the emphasis put on Santa Claus, the department stores, feasting and merriment, he would hardly know it.

One’s thoughts are stirred, too, by an increasing number of newspaper articles, such as the editorial in the Washington Post: “The American Christmas has become commercialized to an extent that is shocking to many foreigners and that almost transforms it into a national orgy of sentimental materialism. But there also remains the fact that it is not merely the manufacturers and advertisers, but the great part of the American people, who prefer to have it this way.”

It truly disturbs thinking persons that many professed Christians want Christmas this way—a time for the materialistic exchanging of presents, a pattern Christ did not set. Bible-reading Christians know that Christ recommended giving, but they also know it was the kind of giving in which one does not expect repayment. Said Christ: “When you spread a dinner or evening meal, do not call your friends, or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors. Perhaps some time they might also invite you in return and it would become a repayment to you. But when you spread a feast, invite poor people, crippled, lame, blind; and you will be happy, because they have nothing with which to repay you.” “And if you do good to those doing good to you, really of what credit is it to you? Even the sinners do the same.”—Luke 14:12-14; 6:33.

True it is, material things usually eclipse spiritual things at Christmastime. Celebrants all too often spend their time worried and occupied in pleasing friends and relatives, while they hardly think of pleasing Christ. This lack of spirituality causes one to think of the time Jesus reproved Martha because she was anxious and disturbed about material things, whereas she should have concerned herself primarily with spiritual things.—Luke 10:38-42.

And it was evangelist Billy Graham who gave Christmas celebrants cause for deep thought when he said: “Let’s put Christ back into Christmas.”

Perhaps this thought now comes into one’s mind: Did Christ command Christians to celebrate his birthday? Bible readers know there is no such command. Christ did command his followers to celebrate his death: “Keep doing this in remembrance of me.” (Luke 22:19) Nowhere in the Bible is there mention of a Christian’s celebrating a birthday. In the Bible only pagans celebrated birthdays.

Not surprising, then, that newspapers and magazine articles often tell us that the early Christians did not celebrate Christmas. The mind is set to wondering about the December 25 date itself when one reads such statements as that found in the Woman’s Home Companion of December, 1956:“No one knows exactly the day or the year of Christ’s birth—perhaps because no one thought of celebrating it until four centuries after He died.”

When one reads in such a reliable encyclopedia as the Americana of Christmas’ origin, it makes him wonder; for under the heading “Christmas” this authority says: “The celebration was not observed in the first centuries of the Christian church. . . . In the 5th century the Western church ordered the feast to be celebrated on the day of the Mithraic rites of the birth of the sun and at the close of the Saturnalia, as no certain knowledge of the day of Christ’s birth existed.

“Among the German and Celtic tribes the winter solstice was considered an important point of the year and to commemorate the return of the sun they held their chief festival of yule, which, like other pagan celebrations, became adapted to Christmas. Most of the customs now associated with Christmas were not originally Christmas customs but rather were pre-Christian and non-Christian customs. . . . Saturnalia, a Roman feast celebrated in mid-December, provided the model for many of the merrymaking customs of Christmas.”

What, then, are we to think of Christmas? How do we know from the Bible that Christ was not born in December but rather on about the first of October? You can have the answers to these and other such questions you may have been thinking about. Jehovah’s witnesses will be glad to give you these answers at no cost to you and from your own Bible. Ask them.