“Christmas is a necessity. There has to be at least one day of the year to remind people that they are here for something else besides their selves. “~Eric SevareidChristmas is the Christian celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, who is considered the Son of God, and the savior of all people. Christ in Christmas refers to the Greek term Christos which means the anointed one. Christmas is usually the time which people spend with their family, friends and loved ones. As some songs go, it is the season to be jolly and to be full of good cheer.
The holiday season has so many icons and symbols that these can fill up and entire Christmas tree as ornaments and decorations. Some people literally cover their homes and surrounding with lights and decorations to celebrate the holidays. In today’s society many people have taken Christmas and twisted it all up. Many Christians complain that Christmas is a religious holiday, but is treated in an inappropriately way in America. Christians have been transforming it into a secular holiday by moving it out of churches and into the public. Due to the immense marketing and advertising during the season, the true meaning of Christmas is often lost.
People nowadays equate the holidays as a time of gift giving and receiving. Although this is not a bad thing, it is also a very materialistic point of view which is magnified by the recurrent advertising that shows the holidays as a time when the tree is full of presents and people are happy to receive boxes left, right and center. The meaning of Christmas is actually how a person understands the season. Some people who only understand that the holidays is a time in which one spends money to buy gifts will always be stuck in this situation for as long as he or she believes in it.
For those who view Christmas as an exclusively Christian celebration and does not celebrate it, then they would have missed the true meaning of Christmas as well. Many reactions to the decreasing importance of Christianity and Christmas are more tribal that religious. Some are turning the phrase “Merry Christmas “into a fetish, something done for its own sake instead of using it as a sincere greeting. If people give it a religious meaning, it will be a religious holiday for them.
If they fill the day with other meanings such as: gifts, family, food, etc, then it will have those instead. Christmas should be how it used to be when everyone knew and honored the true meaning. Christmas day is December 25. The Roman Church chose to put the holiday on that particular date as a sort of a competitive measure. In other words, they looked at the popularity of the pagan celebrations, and saw that many from their own congregations were also joining in on the pagan celebrations, and that the only way to really compete with all that was to throw a big feast of their own.
Reasons for believing this to be the correct date vary. Many people who made the decision for the placement of Christmas were around when various texts existed, that are no longer extant. Also, much information was considered still part of “recent memory. ” Part of the reason for placing Jesus’ birth on the 25th (of December), was because there was an ancient Jewish belief that the great prophets were to have an “integral age” where you die on the same day as either your birth or your conception.
Examples of this belief exist in history. It was believed that Jesus was conceived on March 25 according to some historians, such as Sextus Julius Africanus, so a nine month count would place his birth on December 25. However, modern understand of biology would say that the date could have shifted days or even a few weeks one way or the other. This does not negate the fact that ancient peoples truly believed this date to be accurate.
