Is Christmas a religious holiday?

What kind of a celebration of consumerism is that, anyway?

;-)

You know, just to keep up with the times.
:)

great time to get with friends and family.

Costco has had their Christmas crap out for a month.

It's a big money maker.

I'm waiting for the Pennsylvania Dutch eggnog they have every year ...
http://di1-3.shoppingshadow.com/images/pi/10/f5/98/41760244-260x260-0-0_Pennsylvania+Dutch+Egg+Nog.jpg

It's a spiritual Pagan holiday. The only way the PTB thought they could get the newly dubbed Christians to participate in their made up holiday was to co-opt the Pagan holiday. Tree of life, Yule Logs, etc... all Pagan.

It's been sanitized, commercialized, borrowed and manipulated, but that is what it remains. Religion isn't necessary for the festival.

As a now-deceased friend of mine used to say, "All this pomp over the urge to celebrate the solstice...and one dead talmud student.

Fallacy of black-and-white-thinking in a kodachrome world.

the Almighty Dollar!

If you roll out and go to midnight mass or whatever it is. If you just give people presents and spend time with family because those are enjoyable things to do, then no. I rather enjoy the latter, and wouldn't really find the experience changed significantly if the whole celebration up and moved to January for tax purposes or something.

And yes, I often work all day on Christmas. I really do treat it like any other day of the week.

I know Buddhists, Hindus and atheists who give the kids a Santa Claus Christmas. Most of the good stuff is Celtic and Norse, anyway, and has nothing to do with Jesus. It's more an all purpose winter festival, lights during the darkest part of the year and a bonanza for the shopping mall.

I'll leave the wailing about the loss of the grim faced churchgoing to the grim faced churchgoers.

and Winter Solstice was celebrated even before that. For thousands of years, people have celebrated the "impending return of the sun".

Why do I point this out? Because if you knew the history of your faith, you would know why the date for Christmas was chosen to coincide with these festivals. So keep in mind that just because the Christians tried to coopt the season doesn't mean they get to do so.

Essentially, it is Saturnalia. The yule log, Santa, the tree - these are all pagan symbols.

When the Roman State Catholic Church switched from paganism to Christianity, they kept a lot of the pagan stuff, but just painted a cross on it.

And today - Christmas is a de facto Secular holiday.

Christmas is treated as a Romantic holiday, like Americans celebrate Valentines day. Yes, there are trees with lights, Exchanging gifts, Santa Claus (Most look like Colonel Sanders, and KFC is very deeply entrenched in to the Xmas tradition in Japan) and most importantly the wonderful looking Christmas Cake with the Strawberries on top.



Dec.25th is a working day for most Japanese, and the celebrations usually take place at night, at some romantic hot spot. January 1st, New Years is the most important holiday on the Japanese calendar.

(about 1/3 of marriages were still arranged back then) as "men go out drinking night." Women and children stayed home and ate Christmas cake.

Around the beginning of December, I began seeing bakeries with signs reminding people to order their Christmas cakes. On Christmas Eve morning, the bakeries all had stacks of cake boxes outside and an employee checking people's names off a list as they picked up their cakes.

Kentucky Friend Chicken was just beginning to position itself as the ideal Christmas Eve dinner.

The TV variety shows started featuring Christmas carols, including the religious ones, which missionaries in the 19th centuries translated into classical Japanese. It was bizarre, sort of like seeing pop stars performing in Latin. One of the other Americans I knew then told me that he had gone out drinking at a strip club with Japanese friends one Christmas Eve, and the strippers had bumped and ground their way out onto the stage to the tune of a syncopated version of "O Little Town of Bethlehem."

Japan has a lot of traditional December customs that get folded into Christmas. For example, there's the tradition of year-end gifts (o-seibo)for people to whom you owe favors in the Japanese scheme of things. These are usually something fairly useless, like the fabled $80 melons that you used to hear about. (Ordinary melons do NOT cost that much.) I was wandering through a Tokyo department store one day, looking for Christmas presents for the folks back home, when I saw something that cracked me up: an elaborately wrapped gift pack of six large cans of Del Monte peaches.

Christmas Day is just another day in Japan, and New Year is their REAL holiday, the one that everyone wants to go home for. Until the advent of convenience stores, the whole country shut down for the first three days of the year. It was truly a boring time to be in Japan if you didn't have family, because there wasn't even anything on TV except variety shows where the usual guests appeared, only in kimono.

Adults don't receive New Year's presents except for the o-seibo mentioned above, but children receive gifts of money from their relatives and family friends.

and for confirming my post! Yay!

:shrug:

But, yeah, it is the Christianized pagan solstice festival.

We call it Christmas.

My family celebrates our love for each other
and for others close to our family.

Peace on earth and goodwill towards all.

It was stolen from the pagans with their evergreen trees.

Ancient peoples realized that when it was very dark and there was very little daylight, at the Solstice, they got depressed. Now it is called Seasonal Affective Disorder.

It was simple psychological need. At the darkest part of the year, they celebrated and lit candles & fires so they would have more light. And they ate and drank and celebrated so they would feel better.

This is a basic human need at that time of the year.