Chrisitian Christmas Vs. Commercial Christmas

[Guest hopefull messenger]

Greetings Brothers and Sisters in Christ,  As we all know Christmas is a very special day for all of us as it the day that Jesus was born and 30 some years later He  died for each of us personally. But do we focus enough on christmas for what it is or do we get caught up in the commercialized christmas which is about presents and twinkle lights etc. Gift giving is  a gesture of Love  but we all have seen those who would take this to  excess. Many family budgets are  destroyed at chrsitmas time as they buy to excess and put it on plastic. When i see all the advertisements on tv for  christmas it disgusts me. Stores have  Chrismas decor up after  halloween. Every year it gets worse. Our mailboxes get stuffed with advertisements for a whole month. What a waste of paper  . How do you celebrate Christmas and what does it mean to you. I myself enjoy a nice fire on Christmas eve spending time with my wife as we reflect on the true meaning of this day. We usually listen to Christmas songs and sing along. We usually have a small buffet with appetizers and sometimes we just have pizza .

We  get each other 1 gift and then some common gifts for both of us. On Christmas day it christmas dinner with my family which ends up being a present freeforall with all the kids. I have always enjoyed watching them open presents but I have seen them tear one package open after another with not so much as a Thankyou to the giver of the gift. A lot of people say christmas is for kids but its truly not. Christmas is the celebration of one very special birth, a babe born in a stable. It is the most important birth that has ever occured. We must keep that first in our hearts and mind. How do you celebrate your Christmas ??

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[Guest hopefull messenger]

Greetings Brothers and Sisters in Christ,  As we all know Christmas is a very special day for all of us as it the day that Jesus was born and 30 some years later He  died for each of us personally. But do we focus enough on christmas for what it is or do we get caught up in the commercialized christmas which is about presents and twinkle lights etc. Gift giving is  a gesture of Love  but we all have seen those who would take this to  excess. Many family budgets are  destroyed at chrsitmas time as they buy to excess and put it on plastic. When i see all the advertisements on tv for  christmas it disgusts me. Stores have  Chrismas decor up after  halloween. Every year it gets worse. Our mailboxes get stuffed with advertisements for a whole month. What a waste of paper  . How do you celebrate Christmas and what does it mean to you. I myself enjoy a nice fire on Christmas eve spending time with my wife as we reflect on the true meaning of this day. We usually listen to Christmas songs and sing along. We usually have a small buffet with appetizers and sometimes we just have pizza .

We  get each other 1 gift and then some common gifts for both of us. On Christmas day it christmas dinner with my family which ends up being a present freeforall with all the kids. I have always enjoyed watching them open presents but I have seen them tear one package open after another with not so much as a Thankyou to the giver of the gift. A lot of people say christmas is for kids but its truly not. Christmas is the celebration of one very special birth, a babe born in a stable. It is the most important birth that has ever occured. We must keep that first in our hearts and mind. How do you celebrate your Christmas ??

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[Guest hopefull messenger]

christmas is about jesus but how do we seperate ourselves from the pagan rituals

that we associate with christmas.

we know that this period of time was a pagan festival but the christian church put its stamp on it and said this will be the day we celebrate.

this is the shortened version.

we must be carefull that we dont carry on any of the pagan festivals that are in use today but try to keep the christian faith as pure as we can.

this as been the dilemma for me would we be honouring jesus by using a pagan festival to celebrate the king of kings , each of us need to look into the christmas festival then decide do we celebrate it or not , i try to be careful and try to bring jesus into christmas but we need to tell our children that some of the stuff we use is pagan , the christmas tree, santa, mistletoe , and that christmas wasnt the time he was born , because we dont really know.

[Leonard]

At the hardware store yesterday the checkout clerk said "Thank you for shopping at **** and happy holidays!" So I took the opportunity to correct her and simply say: "You mean 'Merry Christmas' of course?"

She replied: "They won't let us say 'Merry Christmas,' so I went to the manager's desk and pointed out to him that the NAME of the FEDERAL holiday was 'Christmas.' And that Christians were tired of being 'dissed.'

Gotta start standing up folks!!!

[refugepsa91]

Its supposed to be about unselfish giving a time to remember just what Jesus gave to us...even though we didn't deserve it. In my household it will always be that way. And I don't mean just presents...its about our time...our love...our understanding to those who need it.

This year I won't be able to give monetarily like usual...but I plan on giving my time to the local foundations that help the poor in the county I live in. The secret of Christmas....give everday of the year not just on one.

Love and Blessings,

Angel

By the way Leonard....I always say Merry Christmas at the store I work at..and I plan to continue

[Guest firefromheaven]

I found this on the raiders website:http://www.raidersnewsupdate.com/lead-story22.htm

The true spirit of Christmas

Boozy winter orgies, evil sprites and pagan fertility gods . . . Ed Power reports on some of the murky origins of the religious feast day

We are forever being chided that neon Santas, extravagant gifts and the frankly evil novelty singles that leech toxically from the airwaves at this time of year are a betrayal of the 'true' meaning of Christmas.

But the towering, fairy-light festooned irony is that debauched consumerism may, in fact, be a far truer evocation of the 'real' season than we are encouraged to believe.

For long before Christianity had pitched its tent, midwinter was a time of untrammelled hedonism, a boozy, bawdy celebration of the very fact of being alive.

Come deepest winter, our fur-clad ancestors partied as though tomorrow would never arrive. With wolves and bears for neighbours and another typhoid epidemic due in January, it often didn't.

While there is scant evidence of the pagan peoples of ancient Europe devoting most of December to buying gift vouchers for relatives they're weren't keen on, you may be confident they got stuck into the free bar at the Neolithic equivalent of the office shindig with Stone Age abandon. Piety and self-reflection are not thought to have ranked highly on their 'must do' list.

Obviously, they weren't celebrating Christmas as it is understood today. The Christian festival is a relatively recent afterthought, tacked on opportunistically several centuries after Jesus.

By declaring the 25th the feast day of Christ's birth, the fledgling church was consciously drawing upon far older pagan ceremonies whose purpose was not to instil spirituality but to keep at bay the melancholy of winter. Millennia before science recognised seasonal effective disorder, our spear-wielding forbears realised that, come frost and snow, we could all do with cheering up.

"The original date of Christmas was put directly on the old pagan festival of Yule, the winter solstice, which has of course moved forward in date over the years," says the author Janet Farrar, who has written extensively on witchcraft and paganism in Ireland.

What's more, traces of the pagan 'Christmas' continue to cast shadows today. The Christmas tree, mistletoe, Christmas candles, the exchange of gifts are all vestiges of the customs co-opted by monotheism (in the Middle Ages Pope Gregory consciously 'Christianised' pagan festivals, claiming their symbolism as the church's own). Surely these, rather than the belatedly applied band-aid of spirituality, are the truest embodiment of Christmas?

"Evergreen tree, Yule Log, candles burning, feasting, angel on tree, holly and ivy, presents, mistletoe kissing and much much more are pagan traditions that have survived," says Lora O'Brien, an expert on pagan beliefs in Ireland.

Even traditions considered relatively modern are often manifestations of prehistoric superstition.

"The Christmas tree originates from Prince Albert - Queen Victoria's husband and console - who brought it with him from Germany," explains Janet Farrar. "It represents the World Tree - the axis mundi - of Germanic pagan belief."

Santa Claus, too, comes to us cloaked in the murk of Europe's pre-Christian dawn. A forbidding cowled figure haunts the midwinter folklore of many northern European peoples. In its original guise the effigy struck an ominous tone. Far from dispensing PlayStations and Robosapiens, it demanded fearful tribute. The wood spirit's dreadful reign was abetted by fairies and gnomes, precursors to Santa's current staff of elves and sprites.

Over the centuries, this Christmas interloper gradually shed his horrific aspect to assume a benign character, merging with the legend of Saint Nicolas to become - with a little help from Coca Cola - today's Father Christmas.

Hints of that ominous lineage may be detected in Santa's somewhat creepy predilection for sneaking about at night and arbitrarily deciding which children are worthy of presents and which are not.

You would, I'm sure you'll admit, be terrified at being woken by a fat man in damp furs and smelling strongly of reindeer musk padding around your bedroom - particularly if he'd just plopped out of the chimney, demanding complimentary whiskeys and biscuits.

Mistletoe, more than any Christmas token, occupied a reverential place in pagan lore. The Romans, whose feast day of Saturnalia (in praise of the harvest god Saturn) fell in late December, valued it as a symbol of peace, leading to its adoption by early Christians.

The Celts believed the plant, a parasite that lives on bark, contained the soul of the tree it feed upon. In Druidic ceremony, its primacy was paramount. Priests would distribute mistletoe cuttings to villagers to place above their doorways as a ward against evil.

Your Yule log boasts a heritage no less venerable. The tradition of a Christmas log arrived from Scandinavia, where the pagan sex and fertility god Jul or Jule (pronounced 'Yule') was honored in a 12-day celebration in December. A large, single log (generally considered to have been a phallic idol) stood beside a fire for 12 days, a different sacrifice being offered on the fire on each day. Across some parts of Scandinavia, people still wish each other "God Jul," or Good Yule.

As Christianity swept over Europe, the 12 days of Jule were absorbed into the new creed as the span from Christmas to Epiphany (January 6). By sending Yuletide greetings we thus invoke the name of a Scandinavian fertility deity. In its subtle way, Christmas has made pagans of us all.

Even a custom as outwardly bereft of symbolism as the giving of gifts reflects the ancient world. In the Roman empire, parents bestowed presents on their children at Saturnalia. Whether they were nagged remorselessly for remote-control chariots or replica legionaries with detachable heads in the months leading up is a detail that continues to elude archaeologists.

If the thought of a thoroughly de-Christianised December 25 unsettles, be consoled that innumerable aspects of Christmas are rooted unambiguously in modern religion.

For example, you don't need a PhD in folklore to realise that Christmas carols are an explicitly Christian tradition. Nor will you win current buns for guessing the origins of the crib or nativity play. And the giving of Christmas cards only became common practice in the 19th century, when the feast day had more or less settled into its current guise.

We may also speculate with reasonable certainly that the practice of gorging on chocolate and trifle before falling asleep midway through a James Bond film is a seasonal pastime denied our ancestors.

For one thing, nobody had got around to inventing James Bond or luxury drums of Cadbury Roses. For another, they'd have all been gobbled by sabre-toothed tigers while they snoozed, a health risk the modern reveller is blissfully spared.

Sifting through this morass of folklore and superstition, doctrine and pop-cultural tat, one is tempted to conclude that the 'true' meaning of Christmas remains as elusive as when our forebears, cold and miserable, decided to throw a party to cheer themselves up and appease their gods.

Maybe there was never meant to be a deeper meaning. Perhaps, that's exactly the point of Christmas - to provide an interlude where, briefly, the dreary things that ought to matter no longer do.