Getting Into – or Fighting – the Holiday Spirit – First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin

December 16th, 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.

CENTERING

Let us consider how we are united in our religious quests. Religion is the universal language of the human heart. Differing words describe the outward appearance of things. Diverse symbols represent that which stands beyond and within. Yet every person’s hunger is the same, and heart communicates with heart.

Ever the vision leads on, with many gods, with one, or with none. With a holy land washed by ocean waters or a holy land within the heart. In temperament we differ, yet we are dedicated to one commanding destiny.

Creeds divide us, but we share a common quest.

Because we are human we shall ever build our altars.

Because each has a holy yearning we offer everywhere our prayers and our anthems.

For an eternal truth lives beneath our differences. We are children of one great love, united in one eternal family.

Let us remember that our home is with one another, and that we are home.

(Adapted from Rev. Waldemar Argow)

SERMON

This is the time of year when it’s our job to get into the holiday mood. If any of you are having any trouble getting into the holiday mood you’re not alone. You go downtown to a big mall, you’re surrounded by red and green and little sparkly lights everywhere, and tinsel. And the sacred music of the year, like “Deck the Halls with Boughs of Holly,” “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer,” and, of course, “Rocking Around the Christmas Tree.” I get overloaded when I’m in the middle of all that eye candy and ear candy, and I wonder what the meaning of Christmas is.

Then you hear, especially this year, that it’s now patriotic to spend money on Christmas presents. It’s a new twist. It’s sort of like red, white and blue bunting on the manger. We hear that we’re expected to spend our average of a thousand dollars each on Christmas gifts, that merchants are counting on it, and the American economy and probably the American flag and God and America are counting on it. Because merchants make over a third of their annual profit on the Christmas gift sales. I went to Best Buy and The Container Store yesterday, and I was just overwhelmed with red and green and silver and candle and glitter, and a thousand new glitzy things that I’m supposed to buy for everyone I love, to prove I love them. And three hundred kinds of wrapping paper and ribbons to wrap it all in. And I get overwhelmed, and I wonder what the real meaning of Christmas is.

We hear the question about the real meaning of Christmas as though the answer were obvious, but it isn’t obvious. Because Christmas is a very complex holiday, and that’s because it’s a combination of three completely separate and unrelated holidays that have absolutely nothing to do with each other. One is a holy day, and two are holidays.

First is the Christian story, the story of baby Jesus and the notion of God being made incarnate in the child of simple people. That’s the “holy day” of the season. Second is December 25th and all of its history, unrelated to the Christian story. And third is the story of Santa Claus or Saint Nicholas. These are the “holidays” of the season. These three have nothing to do with each other. It’s so complex I’ve decided to take two weeks to do Christmas this year.

Next week I want to get us immersed in the Christian story of Christmas. The story of the notion of bringing God down from the heavens and making the notion of the highest incarnate in someone from the lowest, is a profound and powerful story. I want to spend time with it next week, letting it soak into us. So next week we’ll talk about the holy day.

Today I want to talk about the holidays. Because the holiday spirit that we have has virtually no connection to that story of the manger, except for a couple of songs. So I want to talk about the two holidays that we have at this season. The first has to do with December 25th. Now we know that December 25th was not the day that Baby Jesus was born. We have no idea when Jesus was born. We don’t even know what year he was born, let alone what day. The best scholarly guesses are that he was born between 4 and 6 B.C. – that’s something only Jesus could do! But we have no idea what the day was. For the first three centuries of Christianity, the notion of Jesus? birthday wasn’t important. There were several days celebrated in different local regions for it, but they weren’t big celebrations. In some parts of the world January 6th got settled on as Jesus? birthday. In the Eastern Orthodox Church Jesus? birthday is still celebrated on January 6th.

What we do know about December 25th is that in the ancient calendar it was the date of the winter solstice. In the modern calendar we date that at December 21st. Two thousand years ago it was dated December 25th. What that means is that December 25th, was, by definition, the birthday of all solar deities. That’s the day the sun is “born again” each year. That’s the day the days start becoming longer again. So December 25th was Mithra’s birthday; it was the birthday of half a dozen solar deities celebrated and known at the time.

It didn’t become Jesus? birthday until the fourth century. Around the mid-fourth century Christianity was forced to adopt two days from the religion of Mithraism. Most people don’t know this. The first date was December 25th, which was Mithra’s birthday and was adopted around the mid-fourth century as Jesus? birthday. So now Jesus had a birthday. The second thing Christianity was forced to adopt in the mid-fourth century was the holy day of Mithra. And a sun god has as his holy day the day of the sun. That’s why Sun-day is the holy day of Christianity. In the first three hundred years you can read the church fathers bragging about the fact that there is no holy day in Christianity because only pagan religions have holy days named after their gods. By the mid-fourth century Christianity had one, which we’re still meeting on today.

The winter solstice is the day that had been celebrated for thousands of years as the day that the sun returns. I think it’s our most optimistic holiday. It’s the day in the times of the shortest nights of the year when we throw the biggest party of the year. The Romans had a huge party that they threw at the time. It was the celebration of Sol Invictus, the invincible sun, returning again. They celebrated it with red and green stuff just like we still use – evergreens, holly, ivy – and mistletoe that they probably got from the Druids. These are holidays that borrow props from more traditions than we can even count any more.

After the fourth century when the Christians were forced to adopt the 25th of December, Mithra’s birthday, as Jesus? birthday, the Christians liked the idea of going to the Roman parties. The Church didn’t like it and tried to make it a more somber holiday, but by the sixth century the Church had lost, and the pagan festivals and all the decorations and customs of the winter solstice festival got combined with the story of the birth of Jesus.

When the Protestant Reformation came a thousand years later, most of the Protestants liked Christmas too, though not all of them. There are still some conservative Protestant sects that will not celebrate December 25th as Jesus? birthday because they know that it’s a pagan solstice festival. And we’ll talk about that when we get to the history of Christmas in this country, which has been quite a mixed history.

Martin Luther, the man who started the Protestant Reformation, loved Christmas. He’s credited with being the first person to bring a whole fir tree inside the house for the season. Now Mithraists would have recognized all this, because the fir tree was the sacred tree of Mithras. So we have ancient, ancient religions and traditions involved in December 25th, but none of them had anything to do with the story of Jesus.

When Christians came to this country – this country was settled by Puritans who were very strict – they didn’t like Christmas. They didn’t celebrate December 25th as Christmas; it was not a holiday. You could go to jail if you were caught taking December 25th off work. How do you like that? So this country’s had a hard time getting into the holiday mood too.

What finally brought Christmas into our consciousness and gave us the holiday the way we have it today was really the Romantic era. In the nineteenth century art and music and sort of the whole atmosphere were concerned more with feelings than with facts and rules. Christmas cards began around 1850 in England and became very popular as nice little notes people could send to each other this time of year, and they caught on quickly in this country too.

In the 1880’s Clement Moore wrote his famous poem about the night before Christmas, and he brought a new element into the story that we haven’t heard yet. He brought Santa Claus in. Santa Claus is about a whole different tradition that had nothing to do either with Christmas or with the winter solstice. It’s the second holiday and the third day being combined in this December time, and it’s a story worth knowing. Some of you may decide that you think it’s really what Christmas is about when you hear the story of St. Nicholas told straight.

St. Nicholas, from whom the Santa Claus story evolved, was a real man. He lived in the fourth century, in the early part of the fourth century, before there was a Christmas in Christianity. He was a rich man with a generous heart, and he would go around unseen – because it was important to him that this be done secretly – and give gifts, little bags of gold, to some of the needy people in his town. Eventually he was discovered, it was learned where the gold was coming from, and the story of St. Nicholas and his generous heart spread like wildfire.

When St. Nicholas died around the middle of the fourth century, he died on December 6, and December 6th became known then as St. Nicholas Day. It was a day when Christians were supposed to celebrate the memory of this generous man with his generous heart, by giving gifts to the needy. It had nothing to do with Jesus or Christmas. The gifts weren’t to be given on December 25th. The idea was to give them to the needy on December 6th, and to give them anonymously.

Now the truth is that we may sometimes be big-hearted, but we like to get credit for it. So the idea of anonymous gifts didn’t seem to stick. By the 1880’s, when Clement Moore had made his story of Santa Claus, what was going on in England and this country was that merchants had seized on this and decided that they could combine all the festivities of the winter solstice with the Christian story and the story of St. Nicholas. They had a bonanza. And in the 1890’s, St. Nicholas Day and Christmas became combined, and the notion of giving gifts now became part of Christmas – although it was mostly the notion of giving gifts that you bought, not gifts that you made.

You still find people who don’t combine these. In Holland, St. Nicholas Day and the day of gift-giving is still December 6th. And in some more conservative Christian denominations they don’t combine the two. I have a Mennonite friend who says that all the time she was growing up they separated the holy day of Christmas from the secular day of gift-giving. The problem with not trading gifts is that your kids are the only kids in class who didn’t get Christmas presents, and so they get made fun of. So what her family did was to celebrate St. Nicholas Day on December 6 as a day when they exchanged presents. They celebrated this as a completely secular holiday. Then on the 25th her family would celebrate Christmas. That was a religious holiday when they celebrated the birth of their Lord and Savior. They gathered around the piano, they sang hymns, they had a wonderful Christmas dinner, and they spent the day together as a family.

So what’s the meaning of Christmas? Well, part of it is the meaning of celebrating and singing and having evergreens and holly and ivy. Part of the meaning of Christmas is having fun and throwing a party in the darkest days of the year. That’s the oldest part of it. Part of it is the notion of giving gifts, especially if they can be given true to the old St. Nicholas story.

I want to tell you a story that I just got this week, that retells the St. Nicholas story in a new way. I got this story written in the first person, and I think it reads best in the first person, so I’ll read it to you that way instead of changing it.

* * *

My Grandma taught me everything about Christmas I needed to know. I was just a kid. I remember tearing across town on my bike to visit her on the day my big sister dropped the bomb: THERE IS NO SANTA CLAUS! Even dummies know that, she said. My grandma wasn’t the gushy kind. She never had been, and I fled to her that day because I knew she’d be straight with me. I knew Grandma would tell me the truth, and I also knew that the truth would go down a lot better with a couple of her world-famous cinnamon buns. Grandma was home, the buns were still warm, and between bites I told her everything. She was ready for me.

“No Santa Claus,” she snorted. “Ridiculous! Don’t believe it. That rumor’s been going around for years, and it makes me mad, just mad. Now put on your coat and let’s go.”

“Go? Go where?” I was still eating my second cinnamon bun. “Where? turned out to be Kerby’s General Store, the one store in town that had a little bit of just about everything. As we walked through its doors, Grandma handed me a ten-dollar bill – that was a lot of money in those days.

“Take this money,” she said, “and buy something for someone who needs it. I’ll wait for you in the car.”

With that, Grandma left the store. I was only eight years old. I’d gone shopping with my mother, but I’d never gone shopping with myself, and I’d never been in a store full of that many people. I just stood there for a minute, very confused. I was clutching the ten-dollar bill, wondering what to buy and who on earth to buy it for. I thought of everybody I knew: my family, my friends, my neighbors, the kids at school, the people who went to my church.

I was just about thought out . . . when suddenly I thought of Bobby Decker. He was a kid with bad breath and messy hair, and he sat behind me in Mrs. Pollock’s second grade class. Bobby Decker didn’t have a coat. I knew that because he never went out for recess during the winter. His mother always wrote a note telling the teacher that he had a cough. But all the kids knew that Bobby Decker didn’t have a cough, what Bobby Decker didn’t have was a coat.

I picked out a nice red corduroy coat with a hood. It looked real warm; just what he needed. I couldn’t find a price tag on it, but I figured ten bucks would buy anything. I took the coat and my ten-dollar bill, and I put it on the counter, and I pushed it across the counter to the lady. She looked at the coat and looked at my ten dollars and looked at me. She said, “Is this a Christmas present for someone?”

“Yes,” I said shyly, “It’s for Bobby. He doesn’t have a coat.”

The nice lady smiled at me. I didn’t get any change. But she put the coat in a bag, and she wished me a Merry Christmas.

That evening Grandma helped me wrap the coat in Christmas paper and ribbons and write “To Bobby from Santa Claus.” Grandma explained that it was very important that it be done that way because Santa always insisted on secrecy.

Then she drove me over to Bobby Decker’s house, explaining as we went that I was now and forever, officially, one of Santa’s helpers. Grandma parked down the street from Bobby’s house, and she and I crept noiselessly and hid in the bushes by his front walk. Then Grandma gave me a nudge. “All right, little elf,” she whispered, “Get going.”

I took a deep breath. I dashed for his front door, threw the present down on the step, pounded his doorbell and flew back to the safety of the bushes with Grandma. Together we waited breathlessly in the darkness for the front door to open. Finally it did, and there stood Bobby. He picked up the present and took it inside.

Forty years haven’t dimmed the thrill of those moments spent shivering beside my Grandma in Bobby Decker’s bushes. That night I realized that those awful rumors about Santa Claus were just what Grandma said they were. They were ridiculous, because Santa was alive and well, and we were on his team!

* * *

This Christmas, let me suggest that you give at least one present to someone who needs it, and that you do it anonymously, so they don’t know who gave it to them. You might find that it transforms the whole memory of this Christmas for you.

This is the season when holiday spirits are all around us and are beckoning us, and if we can’t get into the holiday mood, it may be because we’ve got it backwards. It may be because the point of it this season is to let the holiday spirits get inside of us. They’re here. They’re all around us, as they’ve always been, and we have a chance, if we’ll take it, to be on their team. I recommend it, for all of us.

Merry Christmas!