Wishing You A Belated Merry Saturnalia!

Before it gets to be too far gone to bring this up, I wanted to link to some interesting articles on Christmas. This one is from my favorite columnist at NRO, Jay Nordlinger, talking about the assault on Christmas. This article comes from the Wall Street Journal detailing a brief history of the holiday - this is a really great read. And then this article from a Catholic perspective, gives a great explanation of the holiday but grounded in Christianity. Finally, there is this piece that I found on National Review Online (NRO - I don't know if I've ever clarified that abbreviation before).

Professor Wilhelmsen makes an interesting point in his theological discourse regarding the usurpation of the pagan holiday for the purposes of tranposing Christianity:

A solar cult of the Mithraic religion competed with Christianity for dominance within the Empire. Set up to climax the older Saturnalia which lasted from December 17 to December 24, the feast of the Sun climaxed a period of merrymaking when all classes of society mingled together in a carnival spirit of gift exchanging, the carrying of torches, and the wearing of colorful and outlandish costumes. In grafting the spirit of that pagan celebration onto Christmas, the early Fathers transmuted heathen revelry into Christian joy.

The last link is one that I thoroughly enjoyed. I try and avoid doing this, but I'm going to quote at length from the article. I'd really like you all to be able to partake in this because it will lead quite well to my last point. Anyway, you might think that the excerpts I include from articles are too lengthy as it is, but trust me...I do pare it down a lot from what I would initially like to include:

It’s easy for anyone with one part brain and two parts wit to puncture an incandescent bubble of faith. Sometimes, everyday life does the same. It was on a Delta jet somewhere above North Carolina that I first doubted everything I’d learned in catechism. Peering through clouds, those swirling puffs of fog that our ancestors thought concealed Heaven; looking down at the specks of cars and homes and skyscrapers writ small, one grasps with alarming clarity the idea of personal insignificance. In the clouds, a vision of a personal God retreats as quickly as the oxygen supply.

But then, you land. And it isn’t long before God creeps back in. Faith cracks, it mends, it matures. It takes in new information and adjusts. Like a GPS navigator, it recalculates constantly, sometimes a little too often, sometimes not often enough.

Or, is it just that damned temporal lobe acting up again? Perhaps. Or maybe it’s not my circuit board that’s misfiring, but Hitchens’s; there appear to be more of my kind than his. Usually, normalcy is something to be desired; not in the skeptic’s world.

But for those of us who don’t need a God Helmet, who intuit a Presence all on our own, what Hitchens writes doesn’t matter. Here is a man who admits he has no faith, nor capacity for it, but presumes to write volumes on the topic. Meanwhile, holly-sprigged rubes like me welcome Christmas and its admittedly pagan customs because we find in it, amid the carol-singing and present-wrapping and eggnog-swilling, little bursts of joy as inexplicable as a black hole, or a massive wet planet skipping through space.

At church this past Sunday a guy attended who has been investigating for some time, but I think at this point he is developing his own unique brand of faith. As we're leaving he starts asking how we, people who claim to belong to the true church, could celebrate a holiday with pagan origins. I like that my answer would come from the bits and pieces of these various articles offered by people from different faiths.

In spite of differences that we might have in points of doctrine regarding the Godhead/Trinity, Christ's literal resurrection, or any number of other disputed tenets, one thing we can agree upon and celebrate together is the birth of our Savior. It's less about being accurate with the day of observance and more about the universal recognition of the ethereal nature of the miracle we celebrate. In His birth we have the fulfillment of prophecy; in His birth we have the reaffirmation of the vital pillars that support the Plan of Salvation. This time more than any other people are more inclined to act Christlike than at any other point during the entire year. Moreover, it brings faith and charitable living to the forefront of our collective consciousness'. I can't think of one valid reason to not celebrate Christmas that would outweigh all of these tremendous benefits. Not a one.