Christmas is my favorite holiday, and I am sure that many of you share that sentiment with me.
Commemorating the birth of Jesus is one of the profound ways we recognize and celebrate the incarnation. Central to the narrative of Scripture is the affirmation that in the Son, God demonstrates that he is with us, becoming flesh in order to enter and act in the world directly. Our response, individually and corporately, has been to celebrate through the traditions of Christmas.
Christians today in North America, at least, have an uneasy relationship with Christmas. Despite the sound theological reasons behind the holiday, we frequently feel pressure to understand and justify the secular and even pagan practices that have crept in, and at the same time defend the alleged attacks on the religious significance by the larger society. The inner conflict that plays out in our hearts and minds often robs us of the true joy and potential of the season.
I commonly like to view such topics through my Church of God lenses. Lately I have been wondering whether our movement has always considered Christmas as it does now. By and large, today our congregations follow the prevailing customs and traditions observed by other Christians, especially Evangelicals. This has been my observation throughout my lifelong affiliation with the Church of God, but has it always been so?
My quest was to discover what, if anything, was said about Christmas during the first three or four decades of our movement’s history. While I am unable to track down exhaustively every cultural artifact or written statement from that time period, I embarked on a journey through the Gospel Trumpet archives to see what I could uncover. I was surprised at the results.
To be honest, I suspected that in the early days of the movement, there might be some resistance to religious practices not clearly described in Scripture. The pioneers were quick to denounce a large range of extrabiblical teachings and traditions found in denominational churches or worldly activities, so it seemed to make sense to me that Christmas would be an easy target. I was sure that at some point a Gospel Trumpet editor or contributor would chime in on the topic, even to address a question on the matter sent in by a curious reader. Would Warner, Byrum or others take the same path of the early Puritans who settled in America, denouncing the secular practices of Christmas?
The result of my cursory study yielded almost nothing. I was looking for a chorus of Christmas analysis, but all I experienced was a Silent Night.
Again, I did not examine every possible piece of evidence out there, but I am surprised that something of significance did not show up.
To be fair, I found occasional references to Christmas, but they are very few, and none of them attempted to explain the birth narratives, or critique the cultural celebrations surrounding the holiday and season. Mentions of Christmas fell into two categories: 1) passing descriptions of the holiday, and 2) Gospel Trumpet ads and initiatives.
Christmas was not denied or challenged. It seems that many of the saints celebrated Christmas, either as a family affair, or within their congregations. Several news reports indicate feasts that took place in some locations, and most intriguing were several references to revivals and other meetings that started on either Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, and in some cases carried on through to the beginning of the New Year. A few writers in the Gospel Trumpet made passing references to such things as gifts, trees, and even toys at Christmas, so we know that some common cultural expressions were practiced.
The Gospel Trumpet itself seemed to reinforce what was happening out in the field. They piggybacked on the season with ads and other references to Christmas greeting postcards, books that would make good presents, and the gifting of subscriptions. Regarding the latter, it was said that “this little Christmas act may make some Christian glad with the full light of the gospel or lead some sinner to Christ … [and would be an] economical Yuletide gift.”
Possibly, the most interesting Christmas activity that took place in the early 1910s was the concerted effort to send out close to “70,000 scriptural mottos with calendar and hangers … to prisons and penitentiaries throughout the United States and Canada as Christmas presents.” This was paid for by a Prison Fund made possible because of donations. It seems that the project was not always fully funded, and eventually declined and was phased out.
Other than the above mentioned references, Christmas was not a hot topic for Church of God folk in the first 40 years of our history. Neither positively nor negatively. It was a reality, but did not receive much attention.
Of course, the natural explanation for this is that our pioneers were not dealing with the pervasive commercialization of Christmas that we experience. Today Christmas is in our face constantly, and it seems like businesses and consumers alike are anxious to begin the season earlier every year. That was not the case over a century ago. But, this argument is not sufficient. The development of modern Christmas traditions, including Santa Claus, was already well underway in the latter part of the 19th century, so these influences were not unnoticed. There is external evidence that most Christians celebrated Christmas, and were adopting emerging cultural practices. Again, it is surprising that our earliest writers did not find any of this concerning, or, more positively, use it as an occasion to reinforce the biblical teachings around the incarnation. One further example of how glaring this omission is can be seen in the fact that I found several themes and poems in the Gospel Trumpet focusing on the New Year; but nothing explicit related to Christmas.
So, what is the lesson in all this?
Perhaps our Church of God foremothers and forefathers got this right. They approached Christmas simply, both in their homes and in their congregations. They were well aware of what the true meaning of Christmas was, but did not seem bothered by how it was being expressed in the larger culture, at least enough to make an issue out of it. They seemed to be content to find meaningful ways to celebrate the birth of Jesus, without getting distracted by any culture wars going on around them.
We can learn from that. As I stated earlier, our relationship with Christmas might be somewhat unhealthy. We might be expending more energy than necessary trying to analyze it within the context of our culture and defend it from misuse. In the process, we may have lost some of the simple beauty inherent in the coming of Jesus to the world.
For me, my goal this year has been to recover the simplicity of Christmas. Yes, at times I will celebrate enthusiastically, but in all of it set aside the urge to fixate on the practice of Christmas, and instead ponder more deeply on its meaning for me, the church, and the world.
May you too experience a blessed Christmas!
