Jesus versus Santa Claus. No, it’s not a special holiday installment of Celebrity Boxing, it’s the battle silently taking place in many homes that celebrate Christmas each year.
As our culture has grown increasingly secular, we have discarded the reasons for the holidays, replacing the religious meaning with candy and gifts. We’ve traded the “eternal salvation” offered by the Church and replaced it with the instant gratification offered by Joe Retailer.
I’m no expert on Christianity, but I did sit through seven years of Sunday School and it was my impression that Christmas was a holiday to celebrate the birth of Jesus, the Christian Messiah.
So where did the fat man in the red suit come in?
I’ve been told he was invented by Coca-Cola, and those guys can do anything, so I’ll believe it. But where do the two figures meet?
Easter poses the same difficulty in connecting current traditions with the origin of the holiday. Dredging up Bible stories from my memory again, I seem to recall Easter marking the rising of Jesus from the dead. Today, it is celebrated and symbolized by a rabbit impishly hiding chocolate eggs around the houses of already overindulged children.
What exactly is happening here?
If a vast majority of those who celebrate Christian holidays don’t even practise the religion or know the holiday’s origin, why are they still around?
One of the reasons is simply because holidays are fun, they mean days–or in the case of Christmas, weeks–off from school, work and all the other life-sucking aspects of our daily lives.
Another fairly obvious reason is it’s an excuse to indulge. We can justify buying gifts, decorations and food we can’t afford because “it’s Christmas!” We can take another slice of cheesecake or drink glass after glass of the mysteriously fatty concoction known only as “egg nog” (what is that stuff anyway?) because it’s a holiday, it’s a day different from any other. Therefore, we are allowed.
I admit I am a bit of a Christmas scrooge. Not going as far as saying “bah humbug”–well maybe just a few times–but I generally regard the holiday with a slight feeling of disgust. It just seems so much, too much.
We already have more than we could ever need or ever use, and here we are bastardizing a religion simply to have another excuse for gluttony.
My 12-year-old sister recently asked if she could become Jewish, because “they get gifts every day for eight whole days and we only get presents for one.” To me, this is incredibly depressing. Not because she wanted to change religions, but because the reason she wanted to do so was to get more stuff.
Religion is a funny thing. People have fought for it, died for it and pledged their lives to preserve it. It seems wrong to disrespect a religion by paying lip service to its holidays simply because they have some impressive perks.