The reason for the season?

I think the slogan that annoys me the most this time of year is "Jesus is the Reason for the Season". It's especially bizarre when it co-opts the non-Christian symbols (as Christians have always done, though), like this card. But it's just wrong, as well as rude.

They're taking an ancient holiday - one which long predates their religion - and claiming it as exclusively their own*. (Oddly enough, for quite a long time, Christians, especially Protestants, didn't celebrate Christmas at all; many still don't.) The December 25th date was originally that of the solstice - the precession of the equinoxes has moved it away on the calendar, but we're a calendar-bound people, as well as a post-pagan one, and we prefer the date to the day. The list of feasts on the solstice is long (the official one co-opted by the church was the Roman holiday of Natalis Solis Invicti, festival of the birth of the invincible sun, as well as Saturnalia) and many of the customs are pre- or at least non-Christian, too. Lots of the cherished ones are German in origin, coming to America via Victorian England and Victoria's German husband via Charles Dickens.

The bottom line: Mid-winter festivals pre-date Christianity, and there is no reason to imagine that there would be no mid-winter holidays in the absence of Christ or Christianity.

And in America, as I said last year,

There are two holidays in the Western world, both of them falling on December 25th and both of them now called Christmas. There's the Christian festival, the Feast of the Nativity - the one with the creche and Baby Jesus and sacred songs; and there's the other one, the secular Yule - the holiday with the tree and the presents and Santa Claus, the holiday Irving Berlin wrote secular songs for. The holiday with holly and turkey and trimmings, the one with snow and tinsel and old fashioned Father Christmases, the lights and ornaments and reindeer... Most people in this country may keep them both, but precious few keep only The Nativity. Many more than that keep Yule...

Ironically, many Christians have been responsible for this identification of the two holidays by moving their religious one out of churches and into the public, secular sphere. Merchants have been quick to seize the opportunity, but gift-giving is deep in our psyche, and we embrace it.

So I say to those who complain (as they have for nearly a century) about the "commercialization" of Christmas - there's an easy way out of this. You take your god's birthday festival and put it back where it belongs: in the spring. Give the rest of the northern hemisphere back its mid-winter festival. You can not participate in Yule if you don't want to. Though clearly you do. And why not?

Pagan elements of Christmas have come to dominate the public celebration and Christian meaning has been lost. But that doesn't mean Christians can't participate. And it's no reason to assume you have to be a pagan, either.

Atheists can celebrate Yule without worrying that the sun might not come back. Atheists can celebrate Christmas without believing that Jesus is the son of god, born to a young woman-slash-virgin.

We can all celebrate the warmth of humanity in the depth of the cold. (Or the height of summer, if you live in the southern hemisphere, of course.) We can all celebrate family, giving, love. Those aren't religious values - in the sense that they belong to any religion. Nor do they belong to no religion. They belong to us all. They are human values. They are our values.

Celebrate them with each other - gather those you love around you or go to them - and remember the symbolism of the season: after the darkness and the cold comes the light and the warm. Love and hope are the gifts of the season, and the season is its own reason.



(* If you don't know the background, you can look here)