CHRISTMAS FACTOIDS

It’s no wonder that people get critical ideas at Christmas.

·   It is so commercialized it feels like it has lost all meaning

·   It costs most of us far more than we can afford

·   It creates such expectations that Christmas is one of the highest times of death and suicide

Then along comes somebody who starts pointing out

·   Christmas isn’t when Jesus was born

·   December 25^th is a pagan holiday

·   The letters in Santa also spell Satan

·   The Bible condemns decorating trees

And some people think it is spiritual to be anti-Christmas.

I just want to challenge those accusations a bit.

I’ll call this one – Christmas Factoids

I. CHRISTMAS DOESN’T MEAN CHRIST’S MASS

Holier than thou sorts want to point out that Christmas originates with the mass of the Catholic church.

That is not correct

The “mas” in Christmas originates from a Latin word that means missive or “sent.”

Christmas means Christ – sent or Christ was sent to earth from heaven.

You might want to listen to a short video that Jerry Scheidbach did last year concerning the term Christmas. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tp7M0VQIEY0

·   People assume that Catholicism is the oldest Christian religion

·   People accept that the Catholics have decided all sorts Christian doctrines and ideas and

·   People who don’t like the Catholic Church, attack anything they think is in some way connected with it[1]

Don’t accept the arguments that these groups make and

Don’t buy everything you Google either

Much of what you find on Google has been directed to you by Google, for Google’s purposes, and isn’t necessarily the truth.

II. SANTA DOESN’T HAVE TO REPRESENT SATAN

We never made a big deal about Santa Clause when our kids were growing up.

We didn’t tell them that certain gifts came from Santa

We didn’t lead them to believe that Santa Claus was real

But neither did we go out of our way to hide the stories about Santa Claus from our kids.

There is nothing wrong with

·   fairy tales,

·   fables and

·   imagination

as long as you teach your children to separate from fact and fantasy.

I’ve heard all sorts of messages how Santa Claus is another name for Satan, meant to keep people from coming to the real Christ.

If a person wants to, Santa Claus can be used to teach about Christ.

He wears a red robe

Jesus will come again in a robe died in blood in Revelation 19

His hairs and his head are white

Jesus has white hair in Revelation chapter one

White accents Santa’s red robe –

White symbolized purity.

Christ makes us pure through His own shed blood.

The beard and white hair is representative of wisdom in the book of Proverbs.

Wisdom in Proverbs is representative of Jesus Christ.

I’m not saying that there is an infallible connection between Jesus and Santa.

I am just saying that, with a bit of imagination, a person can tell his story either way.

III. THE CHRISTMAS TREE HAS CHRISTIAN, NOT PAGAN ROOTS

The Christian Scrooges out there will take you to Jeremiah 10:3-4 (KJV)

For the customs of the people are vain: for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the axe.

They deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not.

And call a Christmas tree idolatry.

Actually Jeremiah was referring to the very common practice in those days of carving idols out of wood.

God called the places where they kept their idols “groves.”

It was an obvious slap on idol worship, the idol was nothing more than a piece of wood.

The most common idea about the actual use of a Christmas tree comes from Martin Luther.

He’s not my favorite Christian in history, but he was certainly not the devil.

IV. THE CANDY CANE HAS A FUN FACTOID

I’ve never heard anything negative about the candy cane (except that they rot your teeth) but I though it would be interesting to throw this in here too.

No one knows for sure where or why the candy cane was invented but all of the stories have some connection to:

·   Church and

·   Christmas

One version was that it was invented by a church member to give to children in order to keep them quiet.[2]

·   The white represents purity

·   The red represents sin and

·   The green represents eternal life

Two different ideas for the bend are told:

·   That it is shaped like a shepherd’s staff to represent Jesus

·   That it is in the shape of the letter J to represent Jesus

While history doesn’t know for sure who invented the candy cane, they do know who brought it to the United States and that he hung them on a Christmas tree.

Another interesting factoid

It was a priest who invented the machine that makes the bend in the candy cane instead of doing the bend by hand.

Conclusion

This lesson was as much for fun as anything else, but also meant to get us to be a bit more skeptical of all those Christians who are skeptical about Christmas.

You can use this season to teach people the truth about Christ in fun and interesting ways, if you will use some imagination and be willing to talk about the Lord.

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[1] Included here would the doctrine of the Trinity, the word rapture and in some cases, the canon of the Bible.

[2]https://www.missedinhistory.com/podcasts/historical-holiday-treats.htm While this podcast makes much of the fact that we can’t know for sure where the candy cane came from, the fact that the stories are so grounded in Christmas indicates some validity to the base concepts of the stories.