Can Christians Ever Manage to Reclaim Christmas as a Holiday?

Can Christians ever manage to reclaim Christmas as a Holy Day? Well, in the first place, technically they'd be re-reclaiming it, given they stole the holiday from Paganist beliefs in the first place, particularly Mithras worship. Mithras? Christmas? Noticing a similarity there?

There's absolutely no evidence that Jesus was born on December 25th, to be honest. The Bible itself says that Mary and Joseph were travelling to Bethlehem 'during the harvest time'. Now, I don't claim to be an expert on weather patterns and agriculture in the Middle East, but I think I can fairly confidently say they don't harvest their crops in late December. It's the Winter Solstice, folks, or as near as dammit as you'll get to within a few days.

Add to that, of course, that when Christianity was at one of its peaks in history (During the years of Cromwell in England), the majority of Christians in charge of the country didn't want anything to do with Christmas. It was one of several holidays banned under law for being too frivolous, along with activities such as singing anything other than hymns, dancing, sports, and (presumably) smiling or having any sort of fun whatsoever.

But I digress a little. Many Christians claim nowadays that the holiday is no longer theirs, that it's been diluted somehow, by either the increasing tolerance towards other belief systems in Western culture, or by the terrible crass commercialism of the modern world. I might add that you only tend to hear this criticism in the United States, and to a lesser degree, the United Kingdom. You don't hear the Germans complaining, or the Australians. Presumably they're too busy just enjoying the holiday to worry about it.

The commercialism first: Given that a market-driven, consumer oriented society is what people seem to want nowadays, it seems a little unreasonable to expect it to come grinding to a halt during one of the biggest celebrations of the year. Perhaps someone's been reading a little too much Dickens, but the whole western hemisphere isn't going to have some enormous epiphany during December and focus their efforts on charity, goodwill and Christian virtue. The whole economy is geared up towards a peak in spending and demand at this time of year, and I doubt it'd be beneficial to draw away from it.

And if there's a drift away from traditional Christian Christmas values and celebrations, well, it's not exactly happening just at Christmas, is it? To my mind, this is something of a perennial problem. If problem it be, but that's another discussion entirely.

Finally, you can't return to something you never had. This traditional view of Christmas being solely a Christian holiday is a little like Prince Charles' vision of a return to a pastoral, idyllic England; it never really existed in the first place. Nostalgia tends to block out the bad things that happened in the past, but it also tends to create wholesale wonderful things that never really took place. Hence, we all used to be able to leave our doors unlocked (because no-one stole anything, instead of there being nothing worth stealing, naturally), people were polite, never swore, and were chaste, and churches were packed to the gills every Christmas, and indeed every Sunday.

Sounds wonderful. Let me know when you discover this magical land, so that we can join in, then leave, and start worrying genuinely about returning to such a place.