It’s that time of year again, time to break out the ornaments, get a Peppermint Mocha in one of the fancy red Starbucks holiday cups (they’re not Christmas cups you know, but that’s a whole other topic that I have time for but you probably don’t), light up your house so the neighbors can’t sleep, and run up a credit card bill that will take you six months to pay off. That’s right boys and girls, it’s Christmas!
This week in the class I teach at church we’re going to be talking about where we get our Christmas traditions, and it’s very interesting that most of the things that we do to celebrate Christmas come from a pagan tradition that Christians gave new meaning. Take the Christmas tree for example. In the Baltics around the time of the Roman Empire, the people worshipped the tree as giver of life. Saint Boniface chopped down one of the sacred trees to prove to the people that it had no power and then told them to take it and put it in their home as a reminder of eternal life found in Jesus.
Even Christmas itself is adapted from a Roman holiday that celebrated the solstice (I don’t know what it means either, but it was in a book and sounded fancy.) In the time of the early church there was great danger of persecution, so in order to not draw too much attention to their celebration of Christ’s birth, the Christians just gave a Roman holiday different meaning.
So that got me thinking (and thinking for me is very hard, so please pay attention), what are the things our culture does that we could invest with new meaning? My first one to work on: Peppermint Mochas in holiday cups.
1 comment:
Hi Trevor,
Just in case you really don't know what solstice is - Winter Solstice is the shortest day of the year and Summer Solstice is, you got it, the longest day of the year.
By the way, thanks for being who you are and blessing so many. I'm grateful that my son is under your leadership. And I enjoyed your sermon on adultery. Bless you.
Pat
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