By Rev. Fred Gilley
Retired Minister
‘Tis time to decide who has too many or too few Advent and Christmas decorations, and recognize some of us are certain a war is raging against Christmas.
“Happy Holidays” is replacing “Merry Christmas.” School systems take winter (or mid-term) and spring breaks instead of Christmas and Easter vacations. Christmas is only for children, but Jesus’ birth stories in Matthew and Luke are peopled by adults—Mary, Joseph, angels, shepherds, and wise men.
Let’s be realistic by asking, “What’s wrong with ‘Happy Holidays?’” How and why did Frosty, Rudolph, gifts, and Santa become stars in the celebration of Jesus’ birth? Are our gifts intended to compete with others, demonstrate our good taste, or prove our sense of monetary and other values? Christmas and birthday gifts should remind Christians of God’s gifts of forgiveness and redemption through the coming of Jesus to Bethlehem, Nazareth, and the world.
A common seasonal problem is a mixture of sacred and secular, with too much of one and too little of the other. Even our efforts to separate sacred from secular encounter an immediate problem, for we do not know when the Christ child was born.
Guesses favor the years between 6 and 4 B.C.E. Late spring, summer, or early fall are good guesses, for in Luke’s birth story (2:8) shepherds were in a field “keeping watch over their flock by night.”
Early Christians did not follow a church-wide celebration of Christ’s birth before mid-fourth century. Nether did New England Pilgrims before 1850, and celebrations by non-Pilgrims were illegal.
Southern colonies, influenced strongly by the Church of England, gave new meaning to “Merry Christmas.” They also transported Yuletide practices and observed the 12 days of Christmas. In 1870, Christmas became a federal holiday.
December 25th was not the first date chosen for a church-wide celebration of Christ’s birth. Christmas (Christ Mass) was combined with Epiphany (January 6). Some sources credit Pope Julius I with selecting December 25.
Change seldom is traceable to one influence or cause, but the participation of Christians in Rome’s pagan winter solstice festival (December 17-24) probably influenced the choice of date. Eastern churches have retained the January celebration.
Sacred-secular tend to flow in and out of each other, each containing at least something of the other, which is seldom (if ever) all bad. Christians need to know the difference between sacred, secular, and mixture. Acknowledging the unexplainable, memories of cream separation came to me as I began thinking about writing this Pulpit column. I had planned to try answering “What’s wrong with Happy Holidays?”
Farmers with a few cows stored surplus milk in containers until lighter cream surfaced for removal. Cream was sold, either delivered to or picked up by a creamery. Carnation had a plant on U.S 58 just west of Stuart’s town limits. Skimmed milk was used for cooking or fed to calves and hogs. Neither farm, town, nor city populations had learned to drink skimmed milk! Nutritional, fat-free, powdered milk, plus water, also lacked popularity among milk drinkers.
Several cows or goats justified investment in a cream separator, cranked by hand before electricity arrived in rural areas. All of us can have access to an imaginary separator, which we can call our hand-cranked, Christmas machine. Let’s pour all our seasonal decorations, thoughts, feelings, and practices into the imaginary separator. Crank the Christmas machine’s handle until the sacredness of the season surfaces for us individually and collectively.
Instead of wishing you a “Merry Christmas,” I wish you a “Meaningful Christmas and/or Holidays.”
