Introduction & Background
Christmas for me is always about celebrating Jesus, spending time with my family, and sharing traditions that spark comforting nostalgia in my heart and soul. I absolutely love Christmastime. But there are so many questions to ask about the way we celebrate Christmas today. Why celebrate it December 25th? How do celebrations vary culturally? And what do these differing celebrations mean for us and how we choose to celebrate? These are only a few of the questions I hope to address in this study. So come on, ring those bells, and light the Christmas tree!
According to Nothaft, there are two main arguments on why we celebrate Christmas when we do (903). The first approach is called the “History of Religions Theory,” which says that Christmas is celebrated on December 25th because that is historically when pagan celebrations were and Christians didn’t want to be left out of big celebrations. Supposedly, the Roman celebration of the sun god was at this time, so it is possible that Christians christianized the celebration to help bring us where we are today. The other approach is called the “Calculations Theory.” This approach is perhaps a bit more comprehensive because it argues for the logical calculations behind December 25th. Scholars created a chronological speculation that the day of Jesus’ conception and the day of his death on the cross was March 25th. Factor in nine months in vitro and you arrive at December 25th, Jesus’ birthday. Both of these approaches are thought-provoking for us today, and each approach has a considerable amount of evidence behind it. Nothaft ends his article by saying that “one of the most encouraging trends in recent research on Christmas’s history is it’s critical stance in sweeping narratives and a readiness to consider explanations that are more multi-faceted and to accept a more diverse range of factors than has previously been the case” (p. 910). We have yet to establish a solid origin of the date of Christmas, but it will be interesting to see what future scholars come up with.
Aside from wondering why we celebrate Christmas on December 25th, we also might wonder how our celebrations came to be as we know them today. Senn (1981) helps us consider how Christmas traditions merged in Western Europe during the Middle Ages and how Christmas has been secularized today. Some Christmas customs he talks about are Advent wreaths, Christmas trees, nativity scenes, St. Nicholas, Santa Claus, Christmas Week, and the feast of Three Kings. Some of these are ones that are very familiar to us. The Advent wreath may have originated as a version of pre-Christian burning of lights during Yule (December), and the Advent Calendar originated in Germany. Christmas trees also originated in Germany and may be survivals of their predecessor, the Yule Tree. Lights were added on Christmas Eve to symbolize Christ as the Light of the World. St. Nicholas served as a representative of Jesus, so children would write letters of gift requests to Jesus and Nicholas would deliver them on December 5th. However, his secularized counterpart Santa Claus is more familiar to us in the US. But Santa is none other than the pre-Christian Yulegod Thor, who had a white beard and rode a sleigh in the North to defeat giants of ice and snow. It’s fun to see where all of our traditions today originally came from, and I think they are incredibly important to consider as Christians celebrating the holiday today because it is easy to get caught up in all the traditions, celebrations, and nostalgia of Christmas. But are we celebrating Christmas in the right ways, or has it become nothing more than a secular celebration? Senn argues that the Lord may become known through our secular traditions, but that our traditions must also reflect Him if our lives are to be transformed by Him (p. 333). I don’t believe that these traditions are bad in and of themselves, but we must never forget the “reason for the season”: the birth of Jesus Christ and what He was sent to do for us.
These Christmas traditions and customs have cultural variations around the world. Kummer (1998) asserts that Christmas in Vienna, Austria, is so wonderful because everything is rooted in strong ties to Catholicism and the encouragement of family time. There are also lots of charming villages lit with candles around Christmastime and an abundance of Christmas markets that beckon you to stop by with their displays of simple toys and ornaments (Kummer, 1998; Ward, 2015). We can learn a lot about other cultures through their celebration of Christmas because Christmas is the kind of celebration that takes us home. “Christmas, more than any other holiday or celebration, stirs memories and venerates traditions—those that are as peculiar as fruitcake, as frivolous as selecting a tree, or as sacred as the music that celebrates what Christmas is all about” (Smith, 2016, p. 4). It’s the most wonderful time of the year, after all.