Don't forget the reason for the season

By Kenneth Boone (Contact) | Alex City Outlook

Published Friday, December 18, 2009

Although it’s impossible to detour the snowball of popular holiday culture in America, every now and then I think it’s worth pausing a moment or two and trying to understand where it all came from.

Christmas is reaching a fever pitch in the Lake Martin area this week. We’re all running around trying to get decorations up (I know it’s shocking, but not everybody started the day after Halloween), checking off the shopping lists and planning the big holiday feast next week.

In all the rush, the reason for the season seems to get lost.

And in fact, many of the more ancient traditions of Christmas have changed drastically over time.

For instance, did you know the Dec. 25 date of Christmas wasn’t set until the year 338 – quite a while after Jesus’ birth – by the Emperor Constantine?

It wasn’t until the 17th century that Santa Claus became an established part of the Christmas celebration in the West. The modern Santa was based on story of Saint Nicholas of Myrna, who was a Greek bishop in the 4th century known for giving gifts to the poor. Century’s later Santa’s name came from the Dutch “Sinterklass,” who was known as the “De Goede Sint.” Say that out loud and it’s not a stretch to figure out that “Santa Claus” was “the good saint.”

Much of the modern Santa Claus tradition – including the sleigh, the rooftop landings and using a chimney for a door – came from Clement Clarke Moore’s poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” which was first printed in The Troy (New York) Sentinel on Dec. 23, 1823. But even that has changed over time. In Moore’s poem, which we all know now as “The Night Before Christmas,” Santa was a small elf with a “little round belly” who got around with a team of tiny reindeer. Like the rest of America, Santa’s become super-sized over the years, and today, Santa is a big guy – anything but elf-like.

Over time, the culture of Christmas has changed time and time again.

In our house, we have a Christmas count-down calendar that ends with Dec. 25, and that’s how most people in America celebrate the season.

However, in most traditional Christian churches, Christmas (the season) only begins on Dec. 25 and lasts 12 days until Epiphany, the day when the magi or wise men were thought to first see Jesus. You’d never know it by driving through an American neighborhood, when the Christmas lights all disappear and the dry tree needles are swept out the front door well before New Year’s Day.

Each year, the “Christmas season” seems to begin earlier and earlier. Lights and decorations and holiday gift suggestions begin in November. And in most homes, Christmas is history shortly after dawn on the 25th, when the early-waking children have torn all the wrapping paper off of their presents.

I can’t count the number of times that our family has woken in the dark and gathered pajama-clad, at the top of the stairs waiting for one slow-poke or another to rub the sleep out of their eyes, so the mad rush toward those presents around the bottom of the Christmas tree can begin. And if you ask anyone in the Boone family, I’m usually the slow-poke everyone’s waiting on, not exactly scrooge-like but certainly in need of a strong cup of coffee.

Christmas is a wonderful time of year, one filled with ever-changing traditions and marked with love for family and friends, tied together with the celebration of the birth of Jesus. The spirit of Christmas has been alive for 2,000 years.

Over the years, our family has developed its’ own traditions. And the one I look forward to most, partially because it harks back to the original reason for the season, is to read aloud the second chapter of Luke.

That simple act, sharing the first Christmas story together in some family member’s warm den just before bedtime on Christmas Eve, is a tradition I hope never changes.

Kenneth Boone is publisher of The Alexander City Outlook.

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