If the origins of Christmas are not inherently pagan, we might still feel uncomfortable with how Christmas is celebrated today. The religious significance has all but been stripped from our celebrations. After all, the season’s movies, songs, and decorations have more to do with the Santa folktale than they do with the incarnation of the eternal Son of God. And this criticism rings true, for the most part. Historians note that the myth of Santa Claus was employed to sell Christmas goods as early as the mid-1820s, not twenty years after the myth first emerged in the Netherlands. Santa quickly became a common commercial icon, “A figure used by merchants to attract the attention of children to particular shops.” As secular views increasingly grew in the 19th century, people still had a desire to carry on an authentic, ancient, and unchanging tradition. The market provided a way to do this with the Santa tradition. Suddenly, by purchasing gifts and watching the same old movies, we can feel incorporated into something bigger than ourselves.
So, if the early church didn’t borrow Christmas from neighboring pagans, has it now been borrowed by modern day pagan society? Perhaps. Pop-culture Christmas is entirely focused on ourselves and our ability to earn gifts or not. But this doesn’t mean we must throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Consider how God chose to reveal himself to humanity: through his word. In his good providence, God chose to communicate to man intermediately through the Scriptures—texts which can be misinterpreted or interpreted differently by different people. Why would God reveal himself that way? We can’t definitively say why, but God knew very well that some people would twist the Scriptures and take them out of context and some would come to different conclusions about them. But their abuse doesn’t mean we should dismiss them altogether. God doesn’t override our human faculties and zap us with divine knowledge. Rather, he accommodates our ability to read, interpret, and reason as he speaks and reveals himself to us.
In Scripture, God also ordained that certain festivals and feasts be observed so that his people could have a hint at what the new creation would be like. As it is with fallen man, he can turn even good festivals into parties of vanity and debauchery (Eccl. 2:1-3:22)—occasions where man fills his belly while ignoring the hungry and downtrodden (Prov. 23:20-21). These are the most challenging aspects of Christmas for Christians today. Even still, we need not let worldly pitfalls keep us from enjoying the Christmas season. The gospel is so profound and otherworldly that even in a highly commercialized holiday, the strange wonder of God being wrapped in human flesh, coming to the world as a helpless babe to redeem man, can’t be muffled, no matter how crowded the mall’s parking lot is and how obnoxious the online ads are.
