Transcript
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.
Speaker: Yet here I am hosting a podcast about faith. The normal goes a long 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.
Speaker: Happy holidays to you. I'm Jill Devine and kind of in the thick of things, I'm sure you can relate. December is a really busy month. It's a busy season with preparing for gatherings with friends and family, school, Christmas parties. And then my youngest daughter, her birthday is in December. And then of course working for a church, preparing for Christmas services. And
Speaker: It could be a lot and sometimes you don't even have time to reflect on what Christmas is about, the birth of Jesus Christ. But I just am here to tell you that don't beat yourself up. When you have the moment to reflect, do so.
Speaker: don't add stress to your life, okay? One thing that I wanted to do in this episode was actually replay some audio from a couple of Christmases ago. There was a conversation that I had with Ryan Finler on Christmas myths. And I wanted to replay that because not too long ago, there was a conversation that was had in the hallways about some of these things. I'm like, wait, we talked about that.
Speaker: It's a replay for you.
Speaker: of some different Christmas myths that Ryan and I discuss, and I hope you enjoy it. I want to talk about Christmas. So 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' birth. That's when we celebrate Jesus. But what I didn't know
Speaker: Is that it's not really Jesus's birth day, like not my birthday, which is April 10th or when's your birthday, Ryan? May 16th. Yeah. So now you know, I expected.
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
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 25. 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.
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's birthday or is it? Yes. So that's a great question. And I'm really glad I'm doing this episode.
Speaker: 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. And the reality is,
Speaker: 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
Speaker: December 25th, that that was just a pagan holiday that we stole from the Romans. 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.
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
Speaker: Christmas Day was a stolen Roman holiday inspired by this celebration called Saturnalia.
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.
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.
Speaker: China you had a holiday called dongji. By the way, I'm about to butcher some Some cultural words. So please forgive me if I mispronounce these 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
Speaker: This is not an uncommon time to celebrate something in cultures around the world. 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 you'll see in these midwinter festivals
Speaker: 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 and amidst that darkness the people celebrated the coming of light think of it kind of if you were to think of
Speaker: 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 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 the Christians, that's exactly who Jesus was. Jesus referred to himself as the light in whom there is no darkness.
Speaker: And so to these early Christians, 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,
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,
Speaker: Okay, Jesus died the same day he was incarnated, i .e. Jesus died on the cross the same day
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
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?
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 25th. Okay. That's where we get it from.
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.
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.
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.
Speaker: can appreciate like the day and then the nine months later, whatever. The Christmas part. And that's what I've always thought about when you 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.
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
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 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 it became confusing for me because wait a minute, Christ is in this word.
Speaker: 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.
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.
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.
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. I think, you know, if you do it with that, with what I just told you in mind, I'm sure you're going to be all right.
Speaker: Okay, so we are celebrating Christ's birthday, or we're not celebrating Christ's birthday on December 25. We are celebrating Christ's birthday, which could have been December 25, and could have been another time of the year. So, you know, really, it just comes from those traditions we talked about earlier, and
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 Mary's planner or her little diary and the date that she wrote for. Until someone finds that, I think we'll stick with December 25th. 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.
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
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.
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
Speaker: You can almost think of it like maybe commemorating the weight between when Mary discovered when she was, you know, the angel came and announced.
Speaker: 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, 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.
Speaker: Um, 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. Yeah. Which, Hey, you know what? I'm okay with it.
Speaker: 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
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
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. Have you listened to this podcast? Right. Well, I wanted to give you a chance. Thank you. But you really had... We talk about Advent.
Speaker: about four weeks of waiting between the start of Advent and the actual day of Christmas. Well, the Jewish people, the Israelites, they had 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.
Speaker: they've been released and brought back to, you know, 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 Israel.
Speaker: Canaan and Israel and Jerusalem in that area 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.
Speaker: 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 and 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.
Speaker: They don't establish this strong independent kingdom like they did under Moses and David. They're still subjects to the Persians.
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 going to come home and things will be restored. And you're going to be this great, awesome nation again, like you once were.
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 Maccabee Intervault. 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,
Speaker: You're looking at some of those prophecies and like 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. They were waiting for the King of Kings
Speaker: 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.
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. And so 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
Speaker: his birth, his ministry and his death and his resurrection. It's a great way of understanding what all that meant. 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, uh, yeah, good reminder there.
Speaker: All right. What's your one thing that you want for Christmas this year besides celebrating the wonderful birth of Jesus Christ? 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.
Speaker: so that's gonna be exciting. What about you Jill? Oh, well thanks for asking. I just want to be present and 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
Speaker: Be present. See it through the girl's eyes. 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
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.
