A former Facebook friend recently commented derisively that I had named a photo album 'holidays' instead of Christmas, and inquired as to why. So I thought I'd address that question here.
1) My friends include a wide variety of people with different beliefs and viewpoints. The term holiday for me includes at this time of the year Thanksgiving, Christmas and the New Year. However, my Jewish friends may choose to celebrate Hanukkah. My British friends won't be celebrating Thanksgiving with me. And this is all okay. It is the holiday season and you can celebrate or not celebrate whatever you want.
2) Jesus was not born at Christmas. Sorry Christians, but he just wasn't. Look at the Bible; when Mary and Joseph went to give birth to Jesus in Bethlehem the shepherds were sleeping in the fields with their flock. That's how they saw the magic star in the sky. Well in that part of the world it was too cold to be out in December, so shepherds would certainly not be outside at that time of year. Also, the reason Joseph and Mary were going to Bethlehem was because of the census. Because of the extreme weather at that time of year they would never call a census in December. Weather conditions would again be too harsh. So just those two pieces of evidence alone shows us that Jesus was definitely not born in December. Not to mention the fact that the Bible does not at any point claim that Jesus was born in December.
3) Christians hijacked Christmas! The pagan festival of winter included the tradition of bringing a tree inside for good luck. That's why we have Christmas trees. It has nothing to do with Christianity or Jesus. Early Christians simply repurposed a popular holiday and labeled it Jesus' birthday. So let's not get all indignant that people with different beliefs do not capitulate and accept the incorrect notion that Christmas is the birthday of Jesus.
While we're on the subject of the supposed war on Christmas, I also wanted to mention that it is NOT an affront to Christianity to write Xmas instead of Christmas. Xmas in fact is a historic abbreviation 'mas' coming from the Latin derived Old English for mass. The X is from the Greek Chi, the first letter of the word 'Χριστός' which translates as Christ.
So it is a Fox News type of lie that Xmas is disrespectful or part of the fictional 'war on Christmas.' It was in fact a historical term for Christmas dating back to the 16th century.
The bottom line here is that the holiday season means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. But let's stop pretending that there is some kind of war on Christmas. No one in the free world is prevented from putting up a tree, stuffing their face with food, and pretending that Jesus was born in a stable on December 25th.
Just enjoy the holidays, whatever they mean to you, and stop trying to heap your beliefs on others at this time of year.
