War on Christmas?
On my Facebook news feed, I see a lot of posts about the so-called “War on Christmas.” However, something just doesn’t sit right with me when I read these types of posts…
For one thing, the “Christmas Season” starts earlier and earlier each year (for shopping purposes). So, I guess the real war is on Advent (the season of preparation)!
Then again, many modern Christians take their Christmas tree down before the end of the 12th Day of Christmas (Epiphany), so I guess you could say that modernist Christians are waging a (civil) war on Christmas by not celebrating it properly for 12 days as was our ancestral Tradition…
Either way, the people participating in these “wars” are doing so voluntarily.
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Well, since my Protestant childhood in this my country, mainstream Protestant Christianity, as practiced in America, has a very weak or non–existent awareness of a liturgical calendar, especially so , as regarding any notion or practice of…fasting, or of needing to prepare for the celebration of any celebration commemorating events in Christ’s life.
Yes, in various denominations, they do choose to sing some specific hymns for the day, such as for Christmas or Easter…but ‘Advent’ is almost unknown. American Thanksgiving Day, used to be a religious/American nationalist observance too…requiring church attendance, TO GIVE THANKS… TO GOD! Now it is just another ‘family get-together’, where we gorge ourselves on the traditional festal fare….food items which supposedly the Pilgrims ate long ago.
Therefore American Christmas has become, little by little, only a ‘family celebration’ centered around making children happy with gifts…gifts which must be bought in the stores, from the merchants.
Halloween too, is a perpetual big kitties’ day..[tons of candies and all of those demonic costumes=big money for the stores!], .regardless of its pagan origins (which almost no one really cares about). The merchants struggle to get as much profits from people as they can, for: Christmas, Thanksgiving,’Valentine’s Day’ (no longer called, Saint Valentine’s Day!), Easter (centered around the Easter-Bunny, as very few really believe that Christ actually arose from the dead!),…all ‘family centered’, not Christ centered celebrations-hallow and materialistic and devoid of any deep meaning. Yes, some… more traditionalist American Christians, some Prots or R. Catholics, etc, struggle to keep a spiritual meaning to the 2 main celebrations centered on Christ’s life. Nothing is even thought of, to celebrate saints’ events, as Protestantism basically has rejected them, as corrupt Catholic inventions,[ as also prayers for the dead], etc. Even Jewish Hannukah, is grabbed by the merchants, to enhance their profit margins. In America, only $ counts. And since there has never been any standard for American Protestantism, no common doctrine, no real or serious liturgical calendar, no feeling of the need to ‘repent ‘[Advent], by ASCETIC fasting or serious heavy duty praying, (mostly rejected in the Protestant revolt against Rome),…we have the spiritual mess that is our current post-Christian America. And here we Orthodox Christians must struggle to keep and to grow on our Apostolic Faith. Christ God Save Us!