Jewscout,
Let me help you stir the pot. Below is something I originally post in another forum but that has relevance here also:
Before you could have Christmas celebrations you had to have birthday celebrations. Perhaps the best way to properly understand Christmas celebrations is to first properly understand birthday celebrations.
Today there are some people that decline to celebrate their birthdays for reasons of conscience. Does that seem strange? Actually, if you had been a member of the early Christian church, you would have refused to celebrate your birthday.
The celebration of the anniversary of an individuals birth, though customary among the ancients, was originally frowned upon by the Christians, notes William S. Walsh in his book Curiosities of Popular Customs. Historian Walsh goes on to quote from early Christian writings on the subject, saying: Thus Origen, in a homily on Leviticus xii 2, assures his hearers that none of the saints can be found who ever held a feast or a banquet upon his birthday, or rejoiced on the day when his son or his daughter was born. But sinners rejoice and make merry on such days.
Where did early Christians get their distaste for birthdays? Partly from the Jews. In the Bible there is no instance of birthday celebrations among the Jews themselves, points out MClintock and Strongs Cyclopædia, adding: In fact, the later Jews at least regarded birthday celebrations as parts of idolatrous worship.
Birthdays and Astrology
Of course, early Christians had reasons of their own for not celebrating birthdays. Back then birthdays had strong connections with pagan religion that are less noticeable today. The custom of commemorating the day of birth is connected . . . in its content, with certain primitive religious principles, points out the Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics. What principles?
Spiritism, for one. The Greeks believed that everyone had a protective spirit or daemon who attended his birth and watched over him in life. This spirit had a mystic relation with the god on whose birthday the individual was born. The Romans also subscribed to this idea. They called the spirit the genius. This notion was carried down in human belief and is reflected in the guardian angel, the fairy godmother and the patron saint.The Lore of Birthdays, Ralph and Adelin Linton.
Another reason for early Christians to avoid birthdays was the connection with astrology. The keeping of birthday records was important in ancient times principally because a birth date was essential for the casting of a horoscope, say Ralph and Adelin Linton. To early Christians astrology was associated with Eastern religions, Roman Stoicism and the twisted thinking of the Gnostics. Christians wanted no part of that!
Change in Church Attitude
Eventually the nominal churchs opinion of birthdays changed. Why? Because the overall attitude of the church toward the Roman world changed, not surprisingly, when persecution ceased under Emperor Constantine. Nominal Christianity, much corrupted from the apostolic version, became the state religion. Now what happened to her previous hostility to anything pagan?
As the church emerged from the storm of persecution into the sunshine of imperial favor, wrote 19th-century clergyman Henry J. Vandyke, she passed from the lower conception of a church saved out of the world, to the higher conception of a world to be saved through the ministry of the church.
What was the result of such unscriptural reasoning? Then it was that, opening her heart to the humanity of religion, she began to draw near to the humanity of Jesus, and to seek with eager interest for the day of His birth, that she might make it holy. If Jesus birthday could be celebrated, what about other birthdays? William Walsh makes the connection, saying: With the celebration of Christs Nativity returned the celebration of the nativities of ordinary mortals.
There we see the connection between birthday and Christmas celebrations. Many historians believe that there is an even stronger connection. In fact many historians, both secular and religious, claim Christmas is not Christian at all, because it did not originate with Christ. It predated the Christian era by many centuries. Shortly after the Flood the celebration of birthdays and what would later become Christmas had its beginning. It began with Nimrod, grandson of Ham the son of Noah, a wicked, ruthless dictator, responsible for the great organized worldly apostasy from God that continues to this day. In contempt for God and all decency Nimrod married his own mother, Semiramis. After his untimely death, his mother-wife, Semiramis, taught the lie that her husband-son was a spirit god. She claimed a full-grown evergreen tree sprang overnight from a dead tree stump, which symbolized the springing forth to new life of the dead Nimrod. She taught that on the anniversary of his birth, which was December 25, Nimrod would visit the evergreen tree and leave gifts upon it. The historian, Professor Hislop, says: Now the Yule Log is the dead stock of Nimrod, deified as the sun-god, but cut down by his enemies; the Christmas-tree is Nimrod redivivusthe slain god come to life again.The Two Babylons, pages 97, 98.
This is the beginning of Christmas with its spirit. This is also the origin of the yule log, the Christmas tree, the celebrating of birthdays, the spirit of exchanging gifts, the spirit of feasting and merrymaking, visits and salutations, jocularity, revelry and drunkenness. All of this is an outgrowth of the first lie, nurtured by the spirit of Satan the Devil, who told it. In Eden to Eve he said: You positively will not die. . . . and YOU are bound to be like God. (Genesis 3:4,5) Like Eve, Semiramis believed Satans lie and proclaimed Nimrod as a spirit god. With this proclamation a wild celebration began on his birthday that has stuck down through the centuries to our day. In the Western world it is called Christmas.
Nimrod became worshiped as the divine son of heaven, the Messiah, son of Baal the sun-god. Devil-worshiping pagans believed that life and immortality proceeded from Nimrod, and so they worshiped the never-dying sun in the heavens as the personification and representation of Nimrods divinity. Mother and child, Semiramis and Nimrod, became chief objects of worship. The pagan world idolized this combination. In Egypt they were worshiped as Isis and Osiris, in Asia as Cybele and Doius, in pagan Rome as Fortuna and Jupiter-puer. Even in China, Japan, Tibet and in other non-Christian lands is to be found the counterpart of the Madonna, held sacred in Christendom. Pagans adored these symbols long before the birth of Christ, yet Christendom hails these as Christian and adoringly speaks of them as the beautiful spirit of Christmas.
Does It Matter Today?
God, on the other hand, commanded his people: Learn not the way of the heathen, . . . For the customs of the people are vain. (Jeremiah 10:1-3, KJV) Gods declaration against pagan gods has not changed, nor has his attitude toward pagan worship, because, says he: For I, Jehovah, change not. (Malachi 3:6, ASV)
The Bible studiously avoids the recording of the date of anyones birthday, nor is there any Biblical record of birthday celebrations by Gods servants, either before or after Christ. The conspicuous silence of the Bible regarding birthdays is powerful testimony that the same were not kept, that they were frowned upon as pagan. Origen of Alexandria (A.D. 185-254) wisely discerned: In the Scriptures sinners alone, not saints, celebrate their birthday. The only birthday celebrations mentioned in the Bible are that of Pharaoh, when a man was hung, and that of the adulterous King Herod, whose step-daughter Salome danced to make the celebration merry, yes, merry by having the head of John the Baptist chopped off.
But why pick on a little thing like birthdays and Christmas? some might object. Because Christians believe that the Bible principle the person faithful in what is least is faithful also in much applies here. (Luke 16:10)
Besides, while celebrating a birthday or Christmas might seem to be a little thing, a big principle is involved. The fourth-century church began to accept birthdays only after a major change in her thinking. As noted above, clergyman Vandyke referred to the Scriptural principle that the Christian church is no part of the world, (John 15:19; James 1:27) as a lower conception. But Christians who base their belief on the Bible cannot subscribe to such thinking!
Nowhere do the Scriptures authorize the church to reject Jesus statement that you are no part of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. (John 15:19) Where did the church get the authority to reject Jesus words as a lower conception and to follow a self-proclaimed higher conception, that the church should become part of the world in order to save it?