Thanksgiving is over and the mad rush for "Black Friday" sales has finally started to slow down a little. Some retailers are stretching their sales out throughout the entire weekend to entice you to buy just a few more presents this year than last. At these great prices how can you pass it up?! A vast majority of the decorations around are Christmasy in nature as it is the most popular of the holidays that people are buying presents for this season. It is Christ's birthday coming up, afterall. What better way to celebrate his birth than with EVERYONE getting presents way beyond what could have ever been conceived back then!
With such a big To Do over the arrival of Baby Jesus on December 25th, many people take offense if you don't acknowledge it when you are wishing them a good day/evening/undisclosed-amount-of-time without saying CHRISTMAS but rather Happy Holidays. Even worse, take the CHRIST out of it and just shorten it to X-Mas and there's a whole new fight or feelings of disgust towards you because you have disgraced this sacred holiday that marks the coming of the new born prince who will go on to create miracles and give his life for your sins so you can go out into the world being a hateful, greedy, nasty person 350 days out of the year (I took a few days out because I'm sure most of you aren't THAT bad EVERY day)
Where was I going with this? Oh yeah, the Beginning of Christmas!
Every year since the birth of the son of God people have celebrated with gifts and all the goodness and kind-heartedness that they do today. It's a long long standing tradition to decorate a tree, write letters to Santa Clause, Throw big parties with ugly sweaters and engorge yourselves on food that you would probably not eat on a regular occasion without falling over dead by March. So WHY would anyone ever think of wishing anything other than a Merry Christmas?
Probably because most of that last paragraph is completely false.
The celebration of Christmas is, long story short, a Pagan holiday with a Christian Stamp of Approval. *
Let that breath for a minute..
The Birth of Christ was not even celebrated until some time in the 4th century. FOUR HUNDRED years AFTER his birth. Good Friday and Easter were the big Christian holidays, and even after starting the Feast of the Nativity it took another 4-500 years for it to even be considered a holiday. Why did the churches wait so long before starting the festivities of the coming of our savior? All of the Pagan sects were partying up all of December and into January for the Summer Solstice. Huge Parties, Feasts, and Carnivals with all kinds of Sex, and stories of mythical gods and spirits that gave them food, and presents and cursed the ones who were bad that year.
Clip from How Stuff Works :
"Early Europeans marked the year's longest night -- the winter solstice -- as the beginning of longer days and the rebirth of the sun. They slaughtered livestock that could not be kept through the winter and feasted from late December through January. German pagans honored Oden, a frightening god who flew over settlements at night, blessing some people and cursing others. The Norse in Scandinavia celebrated yuletide, and each family burnt a giant log and feasted until it turned to ash.
In Rome, people celebrated the raucous festival of Saturnalia from Dec. 17 to Dec. 24 in honor of Saturn, the god of agriculture. The celebration consisted of a carnival-like period of feasting, carousing, gambling, gift-giving and upended social positions. Slaves could don their masters' clothes and refuse orders and children had command over adults. Two other Roman festivals, Juvenalia, a feast in honor of Rome's children, and Mithras, a celebration in honor of the infant god Mithra, also fell near the solstice."
The Christians felt left out, and we all know what happens when the Christians are left out of the loop or feel out of power on something.... WE TAKE THAT SH*T OVER!! So the Churches step in and say (paraphrasing) "Hey, we're gonna let you guys keep doing your party thing, and we're gonna do our thing to. We're gonna cherry-pick the stuff from your festivities that we like, consider what we don't like to be an abomination, and we're ALL going to end the party on the 25th. Cool? Well that's how it's gonna be you heathens." Bing- Bang- Boom-Bon Jovi we have Christmas or "Christ's Mass"
Why end it on the 25th? Because that's when Jesus was born right? Maybe.... But there's nothing written in the Bible that every scholar can pinpoint in saying 'Yep, it's the 25th' . In all Actuality there's only about a 1 in 365 chance that it was on the 25th of December, because with all the hoopla of him being born, no one thought to mark it in a calendar. Everyone is so much more focused on his death and zombification than when he was brought into this world!! How Twisted is that?!
Now, all the Christians are all hoity-toity about this celebration, and how the meaning of it is being taken completely out of context and is commercialized beyond recognition. When in reality, the way it is celebrated now; Huge feasts, Frivolous gifts, Santa Clause, Decorations, and having it all strung out across the month of December IS the basis of the celebration. This is a time when we can all come together, Christians, Jews, Atheists, Pagans, Vegans, Trekkies, Satan Worshipers, Dogs and Cats and whoever the hell else wants to party down for the last month of the year. It's the Holiday Season for a reason, and contrary to popular belief, Christ is NOT the reason for the season after all. Every Religious belief has their own reason to celebrate this time of year, and it's ignorant and rude for you to try and force a Merry Christmas on anyone. How would you like it if every time you walked into Walmart the greeters said "Happy Hanukkah" and you're not Jewish? Think about that before you go to wish someone a Merry Christmas. Instead, I will say "Happy Holidays" to strangers or anyone that I do not know 100% that they are celebrating Christmas. If that makes me a bad person for wishing someone celebrates this time of year a different way than my own, then so be it.
So live it up! Bury yourselves in debt, Eat until you explode, and have a HAPPY HOLIDAY!!
D'oh! Almost forgot!!
Why is X-Mas ok to say?
It is said that when the Emperor Constantine had his great vision that caused him to convert to Christianity, he saw the Greek letters Chi and Rho intertwined. Chi is written as an 'X' and Rho is written as a 'P', but they are the first two letters of the Greek word Christ'savior'. 'XP' is sometimes used to stand for Christ. Sometimes X is used alone. This is the case in the Chi (X) abbreviation for Christ in Xmas. Thus, Xmas is not directly a way of secularizing the holiday, but since 'X' is not Chi in English, we read the word as X-mas and see no connection with Christ.
Sacrilegious, an adjective some have applied to the Xmas spelling, is easy to misspell. It looks as though it should be "sac-" plus the word religious, but it isn't. Instead, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, it comes from the Latin phrase sacrum legere "to steal sacred things."
That's just my 2Cents. Your Mileage may vary.
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