There is always a lot of discussion this time of year about restoring the “true meaning of Christmas”. This usually means treating it as a Christian holiday, celebrating the birth of Christ.<\/p>\n
But of course, the true<\/em> original meaning of the holiday is the celebration of the winter solstice. Almost all the year-end holidays have their roots in this important day, in particular Christmas and New Year’s Day. As primitive calendars slowly shifted, the dates moved off a little from the solstice, but there is little doubt of the source. The early Christians co-opted the holiday so that recent and potential converts could continue to have a celebration at the time of the winter solstice, but call it a Christian holiday. For example, putting an “evergreen” tree in the house was originally to symbolize that green life and summer will return. Some Christians try to change the symbolism, with a reference to Christ not dying, but the attempt is clumsy and rarely invoked.<\/p>\n In fact, Christmas is only nominally a religious holiday anymore, and only to some people. Consider Christmas trees, Santa Claus, gifts, tinsel, and lights. You see many more Rudolphs than mangers, more Santa Clauses than Marys.<\/p>\n “But” you may say, “the very name of the holiday includes the name of Christ”. OK, so for a similar example “goodbye” contains a distortion of the word “God” (as in “God be with you”), but not many people actually clamor to restore the original meaning of the word. It’s just a thing to say when we separate, and has evolved away from any original meaning. If you believe that words have magical powers then you might consider this still significant, but I think it is clear that the words don’t make the thing.<\/p>\n The main thing about Christmas is tradition and family, a time when we get together to reminisce, to shower gifts on our children and have a feast in celebration of another year successfully lived through. If you want to dedicate the holiday to your god, by all means do so. But don’t force your interpretation on others, including the atheist who can enjoy the holiday as a purely secular event without being a hypocrite.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There is always a lot of discussion this time of year about restoring the “true meaning of Christmas”. This usually means treating it as a Christian holiday, celebrating the birth of Christ. But of course, the true original meaning of the holiday is the celebration of the winter solstice. Almost all the year-end holidays have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}