What is Christmas About?

Christmas is both the most celebrated and the most maligned holiday--with the possible exception of Halloween, which is pretty maligned. People frequently complain, with some justice, that they are forced to listen to Christmas jingles and ridiculous amounts of advertising for months on end. Companies and stores that start advertising Christmas all the way back to August don't help. That is, unfortunately, what Christmas has come to in many households--a blind orgy of greed and conspicuous consumption, all in the name of holiday cheer.

But it doesn't have to be that way.

Don't expect this to be another scroogelike rant against Christmas or a religious screed about how Jesus wasn't born on December 25. That's not what Christmas is about and never really has been. The Christmas season isn't just Christian. It also incorporates Jewish Hannukah earlier in the month. Muslims, who revere Jesus as a prophet and his mother Mary as a saint, have much less trouble with celebrating Christmas than they do with Easter, particularly when it coincides with Ramadan, as it did just a few years ago.

Neopagans celebrate the Winter Solstice (the shortest day of the year on December 21) and some Christmas customs hark back to ancient celebrations like the Roman Saturnalia, in which the social order of society was turned upside down for a week. This is a holiday on which all religions in the Northern Hemisphere can more or less agree.

Christmas is an opportunity to relearn one's spirituality, to relearn how to be a good person, someone who leaves this planet a little better off when he or she leaves it. I don't think that one month, or even two or three, is too long a time to figure that out.