What is now known as Christmas has been more a universal celebration throughout time, a pantheist commemoration of the worship of nature. Pantheism, as defined by dictionary.com, is “the doctrine that God is the transcendent reality of which the material universe and human beings are only manifestations: it involves a denial of God’s personality and expresses a tendency to identify God and nature.” Much greater than the idolatry of Christ, humans have celebrated this divine authority or supernatural being known as God. This even took place well before the birth of Christ.
This celebration dates back to when Sun-worship became the realization then ritual recognition of God. According to Gary Suttle of the Pantheist Association for Nature, “Thousands of years before Christ, so-called pagans worshiped the Sun as a god. When winter approached, the sun dipped lower and lower in the sky each day. It seemed to the people that their god was forsaking them. The shortest day of the year came around December 21 (winter solstice). Several days later it became evident that the sun was coming back. By December 25, the people were sure the sun was returning, so a great celebration called the Brumalia began. Brumalia means ‘birthday’ or ‘rebirth’ of the Sun.”
Therefore, Christmas is more a celebration of nature and life than any form of idol worship. Christmas celebration is the anniversary of why Christians celebrate Christ, but while granting reason why we all rejoice and celebrate the coming of a New Year. Non-Christians, of course, typically use this holiday to celebrate this extremely similar achievement of life. In other words, by celebrating this ritual, we uphold and maintain festivity on this common day each year when this rebirth of the sun begins to emerge once again in order to guide us through another Winter, Spring, Summer, then Fall, and again into another celebration of Christmas.
In concern to the birth of Christ, though, “tradition in the West that Mary bore the child Jesus on the twenty-fifth day, but no one could seem to decide on the month. Finally, in 320 C.E., the Catholic Fathers in Rome decided to make it December, in an effort to co-opt the Mithraic celebration of the Romans and the Yule celebrations of the Celts and Saxons” (Suttle).
This is truly a celebration of our absolute certainty and confidence while at the same time our vital reliance of the Earth and the Earth’s ritual processes. From this point of the shortest day and longest night of the year in December, nature and life will only develop and prosper until the next Christmas. This is a seed-bearing celebration of the birth and rebirth of our vitality, sexuality, regenerative and cardio-vascular endurance which will provide the necessitated vigor to carry us through the New Year.
[http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/pantheist] Copyright © 2008, Dictionary.com, LLC. All rights reserved.
Suttle, Gary. The Winter Solstice, The Sacred Traditions of Christmas, by John Matthews (Wheaton, Illinois: Quest Books, 1998). dependence on the Sun, rain, soil,
