by Ruler of the Doughnuts
Its that time of year again. The holiday season is approaching. With this change in season from summer to fall and fall to winter you come face to face with the inevitable. “Is it the changing of the leaves?” No. “Is it the chill in the air?” No. “What about the ten-fold increase in pumpkin spice consumption?” you ask. Nope not that either. The inevitability I am referring to is, if you are a Christian, the run in with a friend/coworker/churchgoer you know, believer or not, that interjects into a conversation this annoyingly dreadful phrase (please conjure in your mind the most self-righteous and insufferable voice possible):
“Did you know, that [insert Christian holiday] was actually a pagan holiday?”
This is usually where my laser eyes activate.
(Those strawberries were tasty.)
Now for the purposes of this post I am going to forego my usual string of extremely impolite but emphatic phrases I usually give to the low intelligence people who bring this nonsense up. I could launch into an actual analysis and deboonking of the historical and linguistic narrative they attempt to back themselves up with, but that would be useless and boring, as these people are immune to facts.
Now if you have made it this far, and you don’t celebrate any number of holidays for your own reasons that’s just fine, so long as you keep it to yourself. You don’t have some special knowledge (read: gnostic heresy) and you haven’t discovered something that in thousands of years of Christianity no one else thought about. However, for my purposes here I am going to grant that anti-holiday crowd all their premises. Yep, that’s right, for the next couple paragraphs I will grant that every single Christian holiday is a rebooted pagan holiday with Christian themes.
I am sure we have all been there, hanging out with friends, and you are all joking and carrying on and you decide as a big joke, like the people at CERN did, and enact a demonic ritual as just a joke, right? No? You’re sure? Did that sound weird to you? It definitely did to me. This is because no normal person, whether with a joke or not, does that kind of thing. This is because most of us intend to live generally moral but flawed lives. The key word here is ‘intent.’ The people at CERN intended to make a mockery of religion intentionally. They ended up mocking science unintentionally but that’s another post.
What many people fail to grasp is that when it comes to Christianity INTENT matters. Our Lord and Savior repeatedly and repeatedly tells us this throughout the New Testament. Everything in this world is from our Heavenly Father’s design and flows ultimately from him. There is nothing he cannot restore and redeem in this world. This includes the calendar and all the days in it. Crazy, I know. That means that, even if there was a holiday that started out as a pagan, if people take said holiday and dedicate it to Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, instead of some pagan god, they are worshiping the Savior and not celebrating anything else. If you don’t think this is possible then your god is too small.
Alright, now that that is over, I take back my granting of the “holidays were originally pagan” premise and encourage you to go do some research on the subject. It’s quite easy to deboonk if you actually look at real evidence. But regardless of not wanting to celebrate traditional holidays, make your own. Get together with your family often. Stay close, fill your lives with the joy of family. God wants you to have the happiness and joy that comes from it.
I’m not going to disagree with anyone when they say that holidays today have been highly secularized. That people don’t understand their meaning. This is because all of that is true. The solution to this isn’t to run away from these holidays and give the ground to these atheist morons who concocted these silly ideas in the first place. The real way to get back at them is to take back the holiday, focus them on Christ. God wants us to feel joy and celebrate, to get together as communities and families. I mean the Savior’s first miracle was literally a booze run. If you don’t think that means that God wants you to have any fun whatsoever, then I have no idea what will convince you otherwise. Holidays are the perfect time for that, so start celebrating.
Very nice! What burns them up is that every calendar day has a feast or solemnity for the Trinity, the Lord, His mother, holy martyrs, or at least 2-3 saints or archangels. Plenty of reasons to celebrate, mourn, and rejoice.
How get an atheist really angry? The “Home Improvement” feast day, St. John Lateran. Not a saint’s day; it’s the feast commemorating the Church’s first basilica, granted by the emperor for liturgical use. Building went from secular to sacred, consecrated as the original seat for the Bishop of Rome. Continually in use since Constantine’s days, and pre-dates the first St. Peter’s.