Do you celebrate Christmas?

[TheYearOftheLady]

I had zero clue on where on earth I should post this, so here I go!

I've been told by many how holidays like Christmas, Halloween and Thanksgiving, etc are all Pagan.

Halloween I never cared for and still don't, just give me a bag of candy and I'm good!

Thanksgiving and Christmas however...not so sure, so I wanted some thoughts about these subjects here considering the whole pagan issue.

 

[Inkachu]

People who WANT to find things to be against, will always find them.

Taking a formerly pagan holiday or tradition and turning it into a holy celebration of God's love and goodness is a GOOD THING. We do not serve the "pagan roots" of Christmas or Easter. Therefore, we have nothing to be afraid of or worried about IMHO.

 

[Qyöt27]

Besides that, the 'originally it was a pagan holiday' stuff is a gross distortion of Church history and the development of Christianity, and also a distortion of the way that cultural assimilation works.

In most cases, the 'symbols' involved were probably not given the religious significance by their original cultures that modern Restorationists (the only ones that seem to care about this topic) want to assign to them. They were everyday items that people worked with every day.

Think about it from this angle:
A new religion comes into your area, becomes popular either by word-of-mouth or by the sword, and imposes the condition that you have to throw out all vestiges of your culture, even if it wasn't religious at all. What would you do? Probably revolt, and this is why that generally doesn't happen (although some small groups do attempt to do just that from time to time, but they usually don't succeed very well). Christianity didn't spread in order to turn people into cultural Greeks, Romans, and Hebrews - it fits itself into the cultural language of the group, and adopting and changing their existing symbology is part of that. Other pieces accrue over time until the original source of the symbol is lost (and if it's been lost, any religious 'original meaning' it might have had is completely irrelevant to how it's used now, not to mention the fact that there are many cases of different cultures that hold the same exact symbol to mean wildly different things, so even the 'original meaning' thing is inaccurate).

 

[Darkhorse]

My family and I celebrate all three!

Why not?

If we do it with faith, it's good;

If we don't...there's really nothing to celebrate!

 

[Andres88]

I do. I celebrate Christ's birth.

 

[sunshineforJesus]

I do. I celebrate Christ's birth.

me too

 

[Tzav]

No, I don't celebrate Christmas. I did before I changed beliefs and had a fairly large collection of Santa Clauses. After I was widowed, I worried every winter about giving my children enough for the holiday, and seeing their mother in such a worry-mood did my children no good -- I was entirely stressed out and could not look forward to the season. When I saw that I had a good and decent reason to chuck Christmas, the children had their own families, so it was not as traumatic for them.

 

[JayJayS]

Yes, but not as a religious holiday. For me it's a time to get together with people I care about and socialize - share some food and a beer or two and some conversation and laughs.

 

[SwordoftheLord]

My family does not celebrate Christmas or Halloween..... Thanksgiving we do.

 

[amymine712]

We celebrated all the holidays growing up. Now we don't celebrate Halloween because their are no children in the neighbourhood.

 

[Hetta]

People who WANT to find things to be against, will always find them.

Taking a formerly pagan holiday or tradition and turning it into a holy celebration of God's love and goodness is a GOOD THING. We do not serve the "pagan roots" of Christmas or Easter. Therefore, we have nothing to be afraid of or worried about IMHO.

Yep.

I don't care for Halloween personally, just because, but it's the spirit with which people engage in the celebrations that matters. If you celebrate with a pagan heart, then that's not a Christian observation of the season.

 

[faroukfarouk]

It's a time of year when Biblical facts and testimony about the Incarnation of the Savior can be made much of.

 

[Kitty.]

I celebrate Christmas! It's my favorite holiday!

 

[faroukfarouk]

I celebrate Christmas! It's my favorite holiday!

SO do I and there are often lots of witness opportunities associated with Christmas also.

 

[Tzav]

Indeed, our celebrations are great opportunities to celebrate our G-d, especially when we can point them out in the Bible.

For you who celebrate Christmas, it can be an opportunity:

• To love people and to teach them about Right giving
• To answer back to them that you know Christmas is not the date of Messiah's birth when they bring that up, but that you are not celebrating a particular date
• To just be cheerful in spite of the traffic and apparent selfishness at the mall

For those of the Messianic persuasion, it is our opportunity:

• To love people and to teach them about Right giving
• To celebrate the days G-d has set apart for us
• To tell how they lead up to Messiah and to celebrate Him
• And we usually have the added blessing of not dealing with the traffic and the apparent selfishness at the mall, because they are usually not at the same time as Christian celebrations

 

[faroukfarouk]

.... If you celebrate with a pagan heart, then that's not a Christian observation of the season.

Yes, it's the heart that counts.

Blessings.

 

[gerbilwoman]

Indeed, our celebrations are great opportunities to celebrate our G-d, especially when we can point them out in the Bible.

For you who celebrate Christmas, it can be an opportunity:

• To love people and to teach them about Right giving
• To answer back to them that you know Christmas is not the date of Messiah's birth when they bring that up, but that you are not celebrating a particular date
• To just be cheerful in spite of the traffic and apparent selfishness at the mall

For those of the Messianic persuasion, it is our opportunity:

• To love people and to teach them about Right giving
• To celebrate the days G-d has set apart for us
• To tell how they lead up to Messiah and to celebrate Him
• And we usually have the added blessing of not dealing with the traffic and the apparent selfishness at the mall, because they are usually not at the same time as Christian celebrations

Totally agree. By keeping Christ in Christmas and being nice to others you are truly celebrating. By not getting too caught up in the commercialism of Christmas.