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8: Christmas Myths, Legends, and Facts
193 Plays4 years ago
In this week’s episode, Jill Devine sits down with Ryan Pfendler to talk about Christmas. This time last year was Jill’s first time celebrating Christmas as a church worker and there were a number of things she was learning in preparation for one of the biggest days of the year in the church. For example, December 25th was Jesus’ actual birth date OR was it?
Highlights from the episode include:
*Pagan holidays, Saturnalia, Midwinter Festivals, and the Winter Solstice
*Symmetry
*Abbreviating the word Christmas
*The meaning of Advent
*Season of waiting
*Our wish this Christmas
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Transcript
Introduction to Podcast & Host
00:00:00
Speaker
The following podcast is a Jill Devine media production. Christianity has become known for judgy people, strange words, ancient stories, confusing rules, and a members only mindset. This is why I stayed away from the church for so long, but it's not supposed to be that way. I'm Jill Devine, a former radio personality with three tattoos, a love for a good tequila, and who's never read the entire Bible.
00:00:24
Speaker
Yet here I am hosting a podcast about faith. The Normal Goes Along Way podcast is your home for real conversations with real people using real language about how faith and real life intersect. Welcome to the conversation.
Is December 25th Jesus's Birthday?
00:00:41
Speaker
Welcome to Episode 8 of Normal Goes a Long Way. I am your host Jill Devine and it's been a while since we've heard from Mr. Ryan Finler. Welcome. It's been some time and the reason why he got married so he let you off the hook for a little bit. A small thing, a small but important thing.
00:01:00
Speaker
but best day of my life. Yes. So I said I will let you take a little break and have you come back to talk about some hard stuff actually. I don't know if it's too hard because I don't know I'm confused by it all and so that's why I'm hosting
00:01:18
Speaker
and interviewing Ryan today, I want to talk about Christmas. So I'm not great with math, but I believe that on the launch of this episode, we're 11 days from Christmas, December 25th, Jesus' birthday.
00:01:36
Speaker
And with this faith journey that I'm going on, I think most people who have a little bit of background of Christianity know what Christmas is. I know what Christmas is. It's Jesus's birth. That's when we celebrate Jesus. But what I didn't know is that it's not really Jesus's birthday, like not my birthday, which is April 10th, or when's your birthday, Ryan?
Origins of December 25th Celebration
00:02:10
Speaker
Exactly, same. I was talking to one of our friends and coworkers about Christmas. This is all happening last year. This was, keep in mind, last year was my first year as a church worker. So not only was I learning things from the back end of helping get ready for such big services, but then I started having some more questions and
00:02:33
Speaker
May 16th. Yeah. So now you know, I expected
00:02:39
Speaker
So I was talking to our friend, Kellen, and we were talking about Jesus and the birth. And who knows what question I asked? And it led to this conversation of, well, really, we don't know that it's December 25th. That's his birthday. That's just what we've chosen. And I'm like, what are you talking about? And it really thoroughly confused me. And so I thought, I'm bringing Ryan on for this one.
00:03:06
Speaker
break it down for me. So I thought that this episode could be kind of dedicated to myths, legends, things that maybe the average Joe doesn't know about Christmas. And can we start with that whole Christmas date, December 25th? That's not Jesus' birthday or is it?
00:03:29
Speaker
Yes. So that's a great question. And I'm really glad I'm doing this episode. You know, when I was a teenager, I was Mr. Christmas, like listening to Christmas music December or sorry, November 1st, you know, and starting to get back into the spirit of Christmas now that I'm, you know, starting a family and everything. So this is a perfect episode to get back into for me. Good. And so your question was, is Jesus's birthday December 25th? And you were talking to our coworker.
00:03:59
Speaker
And the reality is it might not have been and it might have been December 25th. Oh, great. Yes. So where do we get that December 25th date from? And really, let's let's address what a lot of people might be saying now, which is some people like to say that Christmas
00:04:20
Speaker
December 25th, that that was just a pagan holiday that we stole from the Romans,
Global Midwinter Festivals
00:04:24
Speaker
and it's not really a Christian date. And there's this attitude around it that it's like a pagan celebration in disguise. Are you familiar with that book, the Dan Brown books, the Da Vinci Code? You ever seen those or read those at all? I know of them, but I've never, no, never read it. Never saw the movies, none of it.
00:04:48
Speaker
That's I would say that's kind of a book or a movie. If you watch the movie, I don't read the book. I just watched the movie. But that's what really kind of popularized it amongst, you know, teenagers in high school looking to go against the grain. They're like, see, you know, I watched this movie and it says this stuff about Christmas Day, maybe having some weird origins. And so that means Christmas isn't really Christian. That's what we're going to start off with the dressing. They're kind of these accusations that
00:05:16
Speaker
Christmas Day was a stolen Roman holiday inspired by this celebration called Saturnalia.
00:05:23
Speaker
which was the celebration of the God Saturn, kind of started around December 17th, went through about Christmas Eve. Some people even say, this is where you see diverging thoughts. There are some people who say we stole it from the holiday Saturnalia. And then there are others who say we stole it as the birthday of this Roman God Mithras. So there's already a discrepancy there. Saturnalia is just one of many midwinter festivals.
00:05:51
Speaker
Now there's about four days before Christmas, we celebrate, or we have this thing on the calendar you'll see called the Winter Solstice. And that was a part of the year that was celebrated by cultures around the world. Cultures globally had midwinter festivals. You had, of course, the Saturnalia in Rome. In China, you had a holiday called Dongzhi. By the way, I'm about to butcher some cultural words, so please forgive me if I mispronounce these.
00:06:20
Speaker
The Chinese celebrated holiday called Dongji. Iranians in Iran, they celebrated a holiday called Shabei Yalda. And then even Christmas itself, up until about the 11th or 12th century, it was actually called Midwinter in England. And so this is not an uncommon time to celebrate something in cultures around the world.
00:06:47
Speaker
This isn't just a stolen day that we took from Romans. It's something that continents halfway across the world were celebrating midwinter festivals. And so what
Symmetry and Religious Traditions
00:06:59
Speaker
you'll see in these midwinter festivals is this common theme of the celebration of the coming of light. Midwinter, the winter solstice, that's what we call it now. That is the darkest time of the year.
00:07:13
Speaker
and amidst that darkness, the people celebrated the coming of light. Think of it kind of, if you were to think of these midwinter festivals, it was a way of saying that even when the darkness is at its strongest, we know that the light will come and we're celebrating, you could say, the rebirth of the sun. You could say you're celebrating the return of sunlight.
00:07:34
Speaker
after the solstice, but it's a way of saying that even when the darkness is at its strongest, we know that the light will come. And to Christians, that's exactly who Jesus was. Jesus referred to himself as the light in whom there is no darkness. And so to these early Christians,
00:07:53
Speaker
Jesus was really what these global cultures all long for in these celebrations. They could have pointed to this midwinter time and said, oh, for so long we've been celebrating the coming of light. Well, this is the true fruition of that celebration. We're celebrating the true light that came into the darkness of the world. And so there's that angle to it, right? But then,
00:08:17
Speaker
But then. You could toss that out because the truth is, I think a better argument for December 25th, all revolves around symmetry. But these rabbis and early church fathers believed in a symmetry to great events. So they taught at one time that Abraham was born on the same date as the creation of the world because they liked that idea of symmetry. And so that ideology was kind of adopted by early Christian fathers and they thought,
00:08:48
Speaker
Okay, Jesus died the same day he was incarnated, i.e. Jesus died on the cross the same day
00:08:59
Speaker
that he was conceived. That's kind of a common thing that they did, especially they would do this to major prophets. They would do this to major religious figures. There was this idea that, oh, a prophet dies or a major religious figure dies the same day they were conceived. They narrowed down
00:09:20
Speaker
the date of Jesus's death, they believed it to be March 25th. And therefore they said, okay, if he died on March 25th, he was conceived March 25th. And what's nine months after March 25th?
00:09:31
Speaker
December 25th. Exactly. You're so smart. Exactly. I try. But that's really where the December 25th day comes from. It doesn't even necessarily come from those winter solstice holidays. It comes from what's nine months after the date of Jesus's perceived conception, December
Meaning of 'X' in Xmas
00:09:52
Speaker
25th. Okay. That's where we get it from.
00:09:54
Speaker
That's just an interesting little fact there that even I didn't really know until recently. I think you're taught nowadays that Christians took these pagan holidays and repurposed them, but really when you dig into the history of it, there's a uniquely Christian history to the celebration of Christmas.
00:10:17
Speaker
came up with the name Christmas. Now, in England, it was called midwinter. I'm not proficient in old English. I believe they pronounce it midinwinter. That turned into Christenmas. It's basically a combination of two Latin words, the Latin word for Christ, the Latin word for mass. So that's where Christmas comes from.
00:10:40
Speaker
I like the whole idea of these winter celebrations and this, you know, the dark and then coming to the light and having that like that. That makes sense. Like that is some good stuff there. I don't even know the right words like that. It just makes sense. The conceiving or the dying and the conceiving. I can't go there because it's super confusing, but I
00:11:08
Speaker
can appreciate the day and then the nine months later, whatever. The Christmas part, and that's what I've always thought about when you say Christmas is Christ. And a little fun fact, I don't even know if this is a fun fact, but I remember, I don't know, probably 20s or whatever,
00:11:32
Speaker
that I kept hearing over and over and maybe people still talk about it, but stop taking the Christ out of Christmas and that if
00:11:44
Speaker
For example, if you abbreviate Christmas like with an X and then say MAS, you know, that you are taking the Christ out of Christmas and that's wrong. And like to this day, I will not abbreviate Christmas.
December 25th as a Traditional Date
00:11:59
Speaker
Or if I do, I'm like, I'm so sorry. I just ran out of room or things like that. So that's where
00:12:06
Speaker
It became confusing for me because wait a minute Christ is in this word Yeah, and I kind of was taught the same thing until I took a Greek class in college and I could be off on this but what I learned over the years is actually the first letter of Christ's name in Greek is the letter key and
00:12:30
Speaker
which if you were to look it up, you could spell it C-H-I, or if you were in a fraternity in college, you may have been a, or in your case a sorority, you may have been in one of these that had the letter key in it, but it's shaped kind of like an S or like an X. It's got a line and then kind of a squiggly line through it. It looks almost exactly like an X. And so that was the first letter of Christos, which was the name, the Greek name for Christ.
00:12:58
Speaker
And so really there's even a Christian meaning behind that X in Xmas. At least that's the way I see it. I also think that some people like getting their panties in a lot about a lot of nothing. Thank goodness the Starbucks cup controversy is over. I was kind of getting exhausted with that for the past five years.
00:13:19
Speaker
So you're saying it's okay for me to abbreviate it and not have to pray to God because I put an X there instead. Is that what I'm getting? I think so. If you do it with that, with what I just told you in mind, I'm sure you're going to be all right.
00:13:33
Speaker
Okay, so we are celebrating Christ's birthday or we're not celebrating Christ's birthday on December 25th. We are celebrating Christ's birthday, which could have been December 25th and could have been another time of the
Advent and Anticipation of Christ
00:13:51
Speaker
year. So, you know, really, it just comes from those traditions we talked about earlier and
00:13:57
Speaker
To me, no one else has come up with a better date until someone comes up with a better date, until someone can find, you know, Mary's planner or her little diary and the date that she wrote for. Until someone finds that, I think we'll stick with summer twenty fifth. I'd like to see that person who tries to do that and tries to rework this entire thing. Good luck. One thing I do want to bring up, too, is admin.
00:14:25
Speaker
So a lot of people, and I just think that this is one of those things that sometimes you just grow up with it or you just hear it over and over and you just go with it and you don't really know what it means. And so there's Advent calendars and there's Advent church services and
00:14:43
Speaker
I had to look it up last year because I thought, okay, well, I'm now working for a church. I should probably know what these Advent services are. And I just want to make sure that the way I am saying it is kind of, well, you're the expert. You can help me. That Advent, basically, it's leading up to something great.
00:15:09
Speaker
Is that really the gist of the meaning behind Advent? I believe what I've read on it is people aren't even necessarily sure where they can pinpoint the start of Advent. I believe they know that it started around 480, but they don't really know the exact origin of it themselves. But it essentially is, as you said, this waiting period of you can almost think of it like
00:15:39
Speaker
maybe commemorating the weight between when Mary discovered or when she was, you know, the angel came and announced, you know, you're gonna have a baby. It's kind of maybe celebrating that waiting period between the annunciation and which is that conception time and the actual birth. You know, again,
00:16:04
Speaker
You could even tie it into that coming of light into the darkness, right? We're in a dark time of year and we know that the light, the true light is coming into the darkness of the world. But I really think, you know, there are some who even say that the whole point of Advent is to just build anticipation. Yeah. I did read that. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Jewish Perspective on a Savior
00:16:26
Speaker
Which, hey, you know what?
00:16:28
Speaker
I'm okay with it. A couple extra candles at church if you got those there, you know, not a bad thing. I will admit though, that's about the extent of my knowledge to the history of Advent. Okay, before we wrap things up, anything Christmas related that you think that I should know, the listener should know, I mean, in all honesty, and not joking around, this is a very important day to many, myself included, this will
00:16:56
Speaker
be the day that, at least in my household, we celebrate Christ's birthday, but I just wanted to see if there was anything else that you wanted to add. Yeah. Don't be afraid to celebrate it and don't be afraid to go all out for it. It's good to be kind of in this season of preparing your heart and your mind for the coming of Jesus. And if you want to even emotionally put yourself in the position of
00:17:25
Speaker
Jewish people from 2,000 to 2,500 years ago, that's kind of the position they were in. How familiar are you, Jill, with what happened between the end of the Old Testament and the birth of Jesus? I think you can probably answer that question for me.
00:17:43
Speaker
Have you listened to this I wanted to give you a chance Thank you, but you really had you know, we talked about Advent, you know, that's a about four weeks of waiting between the start of Advent and the actual day of Christmas well the Jewish people the Israelites they had a
00:18:07
Speaker
about 500 years of waiting. So when you look at the Exodus, you see, let me not jump myself. At the end of the Old Testament, you get the Jews coming out of an exile in the country of Babylon. They've been released and brought back to
00:18:27
Speaker
they're allowed to go back to Jerusalem. They've been in captivity in Babylon for about seven years and then they come back to their homeland of Jerusalem. Now that might sound like a parallel or might sound very similar to the book of Exodus where you see the Jews, the Israelites released from their captivity in Egypt and they come back to the promised land of Canaan and Israel and Jerusalem in that area
00:18:55
Speaker
that today we call the Levant. Well, if you're a Jewish person in 500 BC during that release from Babylon, you might say, oh, this is just like, you know, back in the Exodus, right? They grew up with the stories of Moses and how they were led out of their captivity in Egypt. And the Israelites come back to the Promised Land and they conquer all the opposing peoples. They develop a strong kingdom. They've got great leaders under Moses and Joshua
00:19:23
Speaker
King David and maybe some of those popular names you've heard about in your Christian learnings before. Well, when the Israelites come back from their captivity in Babylon, it's not quite the same thing. They don't have the leaders like they did back then. And they don't establish this strong independent kingdom like they did under Moses and David. They're still subjects to the Persians.
00:19:52
Speaker
And then not long after that, around the 330 BC, Alexander the Great comes in, and for about 150 years they're subjects to the Greeks. The prophets, while they're in Babylon, were saying, you're gonna come home and things will be restored, and you're gonna be this great, awesome nation again like you once were.
00:20:12
Speaker
Well, for the first few hundred years, they're looking at themselves like, what happened to these promises of a great restoration? And they're under the authority of all these opposing governments. They eventually, long story short, they win their independence in something called the Maccabean Revolt. They gain independence for about a hundred years. And then the Romans come in and conquer them again. And so if you're a Jewish person in one AD,
00:20:40
Speaker
You're looking at some of those prophecies and you might be wondering what happened. God said he was gonna restore us and God said he was going to make us a great people again, a people that the world looked to and it's been 500 years and that's not happening. Well, what they didn't realize was that the person they were waiting for was Jesus. They weren't waiting for a conquering king who's going to make them a great country.
00:21:07
Speaker
They were waiting for the King of Kings, the Son of God, Jesus, who saved the whole world spiritually, right? It was a spiritual restoration that God was talking about, not a physical one. And so when Jesus comes, He comes at a time of anticipation, maybe even a time of disappointment,
00:21:33
Speaker
of people wondering what's going on with these promises that God made to us. Is God really going to fulfill these promises that He made about restoring us? And the answer is yes. It didn't come the way they expected it came in a much better way.
00:21:48
Speaker
During the season of waiting for Christmas, try to put yourself in the shoes of those people. Put yourself in the shoes of the world that Jesus came into. I think it's a great way of understanding the power of what his birth, his ministry, and his death, and his resurrection, it's a great way of understanding what all that meant.
Personal Intentions for Christmas
00:22:09
Speaker
That's the reminder we need. So I'm glad you said that. And I'm glad that you brought that up because beyond Christmas, there's always things that we're longing for. We're like, why aren't you showing up? And we definitely don't know how to be patient. So yeah, good reminder there. All right. What's your one thing that you want for Christmas this year besides celebrating the wonderful birth of Jesus Christ?
00:22:38
Speaker
You know, I got married and became an uncle in the span of a week. And so I have yet to meet my little nephew Ezra, but I get to meet him this Christmas. I'm excited for that. So getting ready to and looking forward to holding a little baby in my arms, my brother's son. So that's going to be exciting. What about you, Jill? Oh, well, thanks for asking. Um, I just want to be present and
00:23:07
Speaker
patient. It can be very difficult sometimes when you have a bunch of different places to go and with my daughters being little and every month I write a new intention down for the month and my intention. Be present, see it through the girl's eyes,
00:23:29
Speaker
Be patient. And so that's what I want to do for Christmas. That's what I want. I don't think Christmas is as magical as it is when you're your daughter's age. And so if I could go back to those days of Christmas, man, I wouldn't heartbeat. So seeing it through their eyes is just it's it's insane. It really truly is. It's so cool. So all of the
00:23:55
Speaker
meltdowns in between. I just need to just stop and think about what they're seeing and what they're taking in. So that's what I hope for Christmas. And I appreciate you coming on and I can't wait for you to get back into the swing of things now that you're a married man. You're not off the hook anymore. It's good to be back.