Celebrate Solstices but
Forget Christmas
Lester Earnest
https://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/
2017.01.06
Long ago, after most people
had become farmers, they began holding gatherings of families and friends to
celebrate winter solstices because they had little work to do then, having
stored enough food to get to the next growing season, and this marked the time
when days started getting longer. For example, ancient Romans celebrated
Saturnalia, honoring their god of farming Saturn, on December 17. These kinds
of gatherings were, and are, an excellent way to socialize and get up to date on
what friends are doing.
Christianity was later
formed out of Judaism but even though the New Testament described the birth of
Jesus in detail it neglected to mention the date of his alleged birth for a
good reason that I will not go into here. However when
the Romans adopted that religion hundreds of years later they decided that a
birthday celebration was needed, so they moved Saturnalia a few days and
renamed it ÒChristmas.Ó
In the last couple
of hundred years, commercial interests figured out that Christmas would be a business
opportunity if they could convince everyone to give presents to everyone else,
so they invented a new saint called Santa Claus and have since promoted him and
the gifting scheme into a very profitable venture even though that has little
to do with any religion.
I believe we would
be better off if we went back to winter solstice celebrations and drop the commercialized
Christmas gifting. Note also that Christmas has long been a national religious holiday
in the U.S. even though the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution says:
ÒCongress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof;Ó
So why has this
illegal religious holiday been observed for over 200 years? Because most
politicians donÕt have the guts to offend the many people who pretend that Christianity
takes precedence over all laws. So why do civil liberty organizations not have
the guts to challenge this illegal holiday? I invite them to explain.