by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
The first reason for me not celebrating this “holiday” called Christmas, aside from the fact that I never did due to being of a different belief system to Christianity, is that it has nothing whatsoever to do with the birth of Yeshuah bin Miriam, referred to as Jesus, the Christ.
The birth of Christ did not happen on December 25th; that was the birth of the Sun in the Mithraic religion and from this it was imported into the “church” created by the Roman Emperor Constantine and merged with the revelry of Saturnalia. And today it has degenerated to a consumerist event beyond proportions.
As far as I am concerned this is the season of the regeneration of the year when the sun and thus the year gets reborn and progresses into the New Year.
While the giving of gifts has been part of many traditions of the Yuletide it was always one gift and always those were handmade and not multitude of gifts that were made in a factory.
Christmas has become an orgy of spending and it is not one gift and handmade but it “has” to be as many as possible and they all have to be as expensive as at all possible to express our love and appreciation for someone. We seem to have gone totally insane.
And government attached value to this spending as well as we are supposed to help buy the economy out of recession and all that. Sorry, but I refuse to do that as it does not work and only puts more and more profits into the pockets of the greedy capitalist corporations.
Never having been part of the Christmas madness or the celebration of Christmas per se, as for us, when I was a child, the end of the Yuletide, New Year's Day was the day of the gifts as it marked the end, much like it was done in the Soviet Union, with Grandfather Frost and the Ice Maiden being the bringers, of Yule and the new beginning.
Yule marks the rebirth of the sun and it is a potent symbol of death and rebirth – going from the darkness into the light again. Yuletide starts before the Solstice and continues on until New Year ’s Day and this is a “celebration” that makes sense to me.
As to so-called Christmas, the birth of Jesus did not happen in Midwinter and thus is wrong if we come from the Christian perspective, and it would appear that someone wanted it to coincide, sort of, with the Jewish Chanukah, and then they added some new bits from an Eastern religion to it, combined that with various aspects of European Paganism and stirred heavily.
So the celebration of Midwinter and Yuletide makes much more sense as it comes, if done the way is should be, without the madness of consumerism and the expensive gifts “Made in China”, as they most are, nowadays, that nearly need a mortgage to pay for them.
Let's bring some quiet into the madness of the world again with a Midwinter celebration that does not venerate the god of money but that venerates the Earth and its cycles.
So, on that note I wish you a happy Yuletide and some peace and quiet to be renewed, just like the sun, for a new year.
© 2014
