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Sunday, December 24, 2006

The Reason For The Season

There are a lot of holidays (Christmas being the most obvious of them for most of us who read this blog) around this time of the year, and a lot of reasons for having a holiday and the accompanying parties and gift-giving. Some of these reasons are more worthy than others. One of two or three days a year you see all of your relatives is perhaps the second most important (after the religious significance of whatever holiday you are celebrating).

The winter solstice has been a holiday for thousands of years. It probably began when some caveman noticed a shadow of a particular tree and marked it with a rock for no particular reason. Eventually, he figured out that the shadow got longer every day (the sun got lower) until one day when the shadow started getting shorter. It meant that "this winter thing is not going to last forever, spring will come again" which for cavemen who had no books, no schools, no weather reports, no written history of previous winters, and no television, knowing winter WOULD end really was an incredibly big deal. Lots of religions have a holiday around about now just for this reason. It's a good reason for a party, for new hope, when it's too cold to go outside and there isn't much to do outside anyway.

I don't want to upset anyone (and I say this as a practicing Christian) but nobody knows when Jesus was born, and the day we celebrate could be any day on the calendar picked at random. The point is to remember Jesus every year, not the specific day of the year. Most people know that 25 December is the birthday of Mithras, a pagan god popular in the Roman Empire. When the Empire picked Christianity as "the new state religion" sometime around 310AD, the emperor more or less forced the Christians to merge with all the other religions. Thus, Mithrasday became Christmas day so that all the worshipers of the now-illegal Mithras cult could become Christians without having to give up their big party. They had been having this party (and giving each other presents) a couple of centuries before Jesus. (Lots of other stuff happened. The cults of Apollonius and Simon Magus merged into Christ, and the temples of the Isis cult became churches dedicated to the Virgin Mary.) It doesn't shake my faith one bit to know this, and shouldn't shake anybody else's. (Christians can say, with some validity, that they had it right all along and everybody else just changed the signs on their temples and got with the program.) When the Christians said "welcome to the faith" the Mithraans said "welcome to the party" and a good time (along with new sheet music) was doubtless had by all. Everybody still worshipped and had family over for dinner and if the Christians said that "this present giving thing" that they adopted as a new custom reflected the gifts of the maggi then I guess maybe it did.

You are welcome to worship whatever god or celebrate whatever holiday you want. I will always smile and chuckle about Mithras but won't forget that this is the day we celebrate that Jesus came to Earth, even if the odds are that it's not the exact day. Winter solstice is a time hope and Jesus certainly brought that. Worship should be the most important thing (even atheists can celebrate that we're now pretty sure that winter is eventually going to end), family the second. Getting presents is dead last; giving them is part of the second reason. I get more fun out of giving to local charities than the presents I get. In an age of instant gratification, I buy my own Christmas presents any time fo the year that I think I deserve one.

So take a moment to remember your own "reasons for the season" and ask yourself if maybe you could find a better one.