Joyous holiday had contentious beginnings

Did you know Alabama was the first state to declare Christmas an official holiday?
   
That happened in 1836, 71 years before the last state — Oklahoma — followed suit in 1907. Christmas is the only legal national religious holiday in the United States.
   
While it has been less than 100 years since all 50 states recognized Christmas as an official holiday, Dec. 25 has been celebrated for centuries by Christians as Jesus’ birthday.
   
But until 245 A.D., when a group of scholars tried to determine the date of Christmas, the question had never been addressed, according to a 1995 article by Victor M. Parachin in  Christian Reader. However, the project by the early church theologians was denounced by a church council, which thought it wrong to celebrate Jesus’ birthday “as though he were a King Pharaoh.”
   
That didn’t prevent the scholar-theologians from continuing their quest to determine the day Jesus was born. They originally listed four dates — Jan. 1 and 6, March 25 and May 20 — as possibilities, according to Parachin’s research.
   
The May date was first thought to be closest to the authentic date because of the Bible’s reference in Luke 2:8 that the shepherds were “keeping watch over their flock by night.”
   
Shepherds only watched over their sheep at night during the spring lambing season. During the winter, the flocks would be inside enclosed corrals without a posted guard.
   
Other scholars, such as Samuel Bacchiocchi, believe the date was closer to the Feast of the Tabernacles celebration, which falls in late September or early October. It is called the “season of our joy,” found in Deuteronomy 16:13–14, according to Bacchiocchi, a retired professor of theology from Andrews University, a Seventh-Day Adventist school in Michigan.
   
It wasn’t until 349 A.D. that Dec. 25 was formally chosen as Christmas Day by Pope Julius. The date was already celebrated as the Natalis Solis Invicti in honor of the sun god, Mithras, by Roman citizens. They decorated their homes with greenery, exchanged gifts and gathered for festive meals on that date, observed just after the winter solstice.
   
Many scholars believe Pope Julius picked Dec. 25 as Christmas Day to convert followers of Mithras, in addition to providing Christians with an opportunity to celebrate Jesus’ birth.
   
Christmas continued, however, to be a contentious issue. In 17th century England and early America, English Puritans said the Bible offered no clear basis for celebrating Jesus’ birth. In 1643, the English Parliament outlawed not only Christmas but also Easter and other Christian celebrations. 
   
But by 1660, Christmas had become such a popular holiday that the law was repealed.
   
After the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth, Mass., in 1620, their English misgivings about Christmas celebrations continued. In 1659, people in Massachusetts who celebrated Christmas were fined. The law was struck down in 1681 because the popularity of observing Christmas had grown immensely.
   
However, Christian groups remained divided over whether Christmas should be celebrated because of its ties to pagan observances.
   
The Lutherans, Dutch Reformed, Catholic and Anglican churches forged ahead with the celebrations while the Baptists, Presbyterians, Quakers and Puritans continued to rail against it. 
   
Even today, some Christian groups, including many Churches of Christ and Seventh-Day Adventists, do not acknowledge Christmas as a religious observance. But most groups do recognize it as a secular holiday.
   
“It is very unlikely that Dec. 25 is actually the birth date of Christ,” said Huntsville Church of Christ minister Byron Laird.
   
“The birth of Christ is something we all believe in, but we do not celebrate it as a religious holiday. However, many or most (Church of Christ) families do celebrate it as a time of exchanging gifts and getting together.”
   
Bacchiocchi wrote in a 2000 newsletter that, while growing up in Rome, his Adventist family regarded Christmas as “a Catholic festival.”
   
Even when he came to America to attend Andrews in the early 1960s, Bacchiocchi said he “doesn’t recall much Christmas decorations and celebrations in the churches I visited.” But he noted that tradition gradually changed over the past four decades as more and more Adventist churches added candles and decorations during the Advent season.
   
Bacchiocchi believes a more simple celebration of Jesus’ birth “would be more in keeping with the setting of his birth.”
   
But Timothy George, dean of Beeson Divinity School at Samford University, said Christmas celebrations, music and decorations — both elaborate and simple — point beyond themselves to the reality of the season. “We are not be seduced by the commercialism of the culture around us, but music and art, sound and light are the sort of things we associate with the season.”
   
Glamour and drama is not necessary — a simple observance is just as honoring to the Lord, he said.
   
But while there is time for quiet Scripture reading and other simple things, color, light and glitter has its place too, George added.
   
“These are other ways the truth is brought home to us, and I think it is important that this happens in our culture,” George said. “Attention-getters can be used — things that reflect the Light that pierced the darkness of the bleak midwinter.”
   
In churches, heralding Christmas with fanfare lets those outside the church know that the holiday is significant for Christians, said Henry Cox, president of the Alabama Baptist State Convention and pastor of First Baptist Church, Bay Minette.
   
“The society in which we live needs to see that it’s an important time for us,” Cox said. “It is more than parties, more than gift-giving. It is a time for us to go back to our roots, to the foundations and very beginnings of our faith.”
   
Church observances provide a counterbalance for the commercial aspects of the holiday, he said, bringing out the spiritual significance that might otherwise be lost in the shuffle.
   
“The congregation needs to celebrate the birth of Christ in a very beautiful and meaningful way,” Cox said. “Christmas is the beginning point ­— it sets the tone to move right into the Christian calendar and leads us into the year with the coming of Christ on our minds.” (RNS, TAB)