War on White Christmas

 

So many people talk about war on Christmas but fail to grasp just how wide the scope of said War is. I believe most people on the right would agree on the fact that some sort of War is being waged against those of us who hold Christmas celebrations. This year in particular, as the falsehoods of the pandemic has led to new battles that many Christians and Western countrymen seem not willing to face. But not only must we face these challenges, we must win them.

 

One can watch on the History Channel (or on Youtube, like I did) a series that purports to showcase Christmas traditions from decades past. I tuned in to this out of mild interest, as traditions are something I am always eager to learn more about. Sadly, I tuned out after a few minutes as I realized this multi-part series was nothing more than a gross glorification, not of changing traditions, but of changing consumerist tastes. “Guess what toys kids begged their parents for in the 70s? You’ll never believe what Christmas song topped the charts in ‘87!” That sort of thing. But it did get me wondering, where did all the old stories of the Christmas traditions go to? You know the ones. About why we bring trees in the house and light them, or the early myths of St. Nicholas and St. Peter, or the traditions of Yule Logs and Wreaths. Maybe this was never taught in public schools. I only remember when I was a young lad and my parents, indulging my curiosity in histories and traditions, bought me a few books on Christmas traditions, books which I read and re-read voraciously.

 

There was a short time when I was very young that I remember we did not have Christmas trees or lights or any decorations. My family believed at that time that trees and wreaths and all that were evil and demonic due to their pagan, non-Christian roots. For a few years, we would celebrate Christmas with a more quiet and somber tone, reading from the Bible in the morning, exchanging a few gifts and later eating heartily. It did not take long for us to return to more traditional roots and we turned the Christmas decorating into a family affair. Ornaments were hand-crafted each year and some were passed down from previous generations. While still somber, a certain familial joy had crept in with the celebration of tradition.

 

I think a lot of Christians get confused about traditions. Many, while rightly throwing away the brazen commercialism of Christmas the world has placed upon that holy day, have also wrongly thrown out the celebratory nature of Christmas altogether. I know of many sects of Christianity that do not celebrate Christmas in any way, as they perceive in it some form of evil that must be rejected. For some Christians it is not only the commercial aspect that must be rejected, but the traditions as well, as they harken back to ancient pagan rituals. These pagan roots of tradition have spoiled the whole barrel for these Christians, so they reject Christmas and all of its joy.

 

This has unfortunately led to us opening a new front of assault for the enemy, as they can now easily divide and conquer. Not only can our enemies now wage war for us on a Christian front, but they can seek to separate us from our past and attack us on the point of tradition as well. Since so many of us are spending so much time asking what is right and what is evil, what is pagan and what is Christian, we fail to see that everything gets slowly replaced by the monolithic corporate entities of store savings cards and Coca-Cola salesmen. We have allowed the enemies of Christmas to turn us against each other for their own personal gain.

 

We must realize this about our enemies. Many of them do not believe in Christ. They simply choose to live in ignorance, or even outright rejection of our Lord and Savior. That is a sad fact of the world, but it is true. They do not want us to celebrate Christmas because they do not want us to give God the glory, they do not want us to remember Jesus and they most certainly do not want us to celebrate his birth and later, his subsequent victory over Death. Jesus is anathema to these people, these Prometheans of the world. They care only for materialistic gain and wealth. Anything they can do to harm us and by extension, Christ, they will attempt. Even if that means concocting a mild flu-like virus pandemic to force you to stay indoors and not gather with your family to pray and sing praises to our King.

 

Likewise, many of these enemies do not understand our culture. Look at the faces of those who spearhead anti-Christmas movements. They have foreign faces and come from faraway lands, lands without 2,000 years of Christian history and thousands more years of Greek, Roman and Western roots. These lands may not even celebrate a Winter Solstice, as winter could never appear on their sunny, sub-tropical or oriental shores. Yet they come here, to America and the West, and we allow them to sit in positions of power and they in turn look down on us in disdain. After all, we do not understand them or their culture. Neither do they care to understand ours. Our Christmas to them is an oddity. Our brightly-lit trees, our carols and Christmas treats are as foreign to them as camels, jungles, or pagodas would be to us. They do not know or do not care to know of the traditions with roots in ancient Celtic, Teutonic or Roman beliefs. It is all foreign nonsense to them, yet they are not in a foreign land. They are here, in our country. They are in your public offices and on your screens, telling you how to live your life.

 

Of course, these types of enemies do not understand the Christ traditions either. In fact, such religious traditions may be abhorrent to them, these enemies of ours with their own righteous beliefs totally opposite to ours. If our beliefs are sacrilegious to their way of life and they are put in positions of power, why wouldn’t they seek to stamp out our traditions any way they could? We are to be more accepting, we are told by more of the same enemies, even as they tear down our Nativities and cancel our town traditions. After all, it is a multi-cultural society now. Not to mention a sick one that must seek to avoid contact with others of our kind unless we catch the plague. Unfortunately for us and our families, we are beginning to slip to the bottom of the caste system.

 

We do not need to let it be this way. As Christians, we can do much to avoid the worldlier, commercial aspects of Christmas while still practicing our traditions. I myself see nothing wrong with decorating a tree. We have Christianized this ancient pagan tradition and made it our own. No longer do we use it to celebrate Wotan and the eternal forest, but now we celebrate Christ and his eternal gift of Life. Yet this tradition connects us to our ancestors, reminding us of the darkness we have risen from and overcome with the help of Christ Jesus. We can look back with pride at our hardy forefathers who struggled through the long, dark winters that only Northern Europe could make and realize that some of that same hardy spirit lives on in us today. Christmas can and should be a celebration of family. It is a celebration of our immediate family and the joy we can bring one another. It is a celebration of our ancestral family and the folk spirit that we carry on by torchlight. And most importantly, it is a celebration of Christian family, as we realize that we are brought into the realm of the Eternal One because His Divine Son decided to make Himself a little lower than the angels in a little town in Judea over 2,000 years ago.