Current Events > Is it important to celebrate Jesus' FAKE birthday? Why or why not?

(+) Yeah! (+)

This board has a lot of people who are atheist, christian or other so information on this topic is usually more abounding than it is elsewhere. As you guys probably know, Jesus was born in the spring. Christmas is a hold over from non-Christian religious worship of non-Christian gods which infact was a celebration of revelry up until the 1800s when Puritans were like "i'm out this is messed up" and corporations got their property damaged so they joined hands to make a more Capitalism friendly, kid-centric form of celebration which is what we know of the holiday today.

Do you find this an important celebration? Why or why not? To appease family? For fun? Fit in with society? Being euphoric in your own enlightenment? Showcase pervasive Capitalism and combat it?
Fight against false truth?

Christmas is a trash holiday

Thanks, but I dont need any edge this morning. I already shaved.

Christmas isn't about Jesus at all and hasn't been for a long time. if you think it still is, then your worldview is divorced from reality.

mustachedmystic posted...

Thanks, but I dont need any edge this morning. I already shaved.

nothing I said was edgy

I get celebrating Jesus's fake birthday, but why also celebrate the eve of Jesus's fake birthday? Does anyone else celebrate the eve of their fake birthday?

ok correction I did say one edgy thing:

Being euphoric in your own enlightenment?

But it is a humurous line give me a break

Mithras is the reason for the season

lilORANG posted...

I get celebrating Jesus's fake birthday, but why also celebrate the eve of Jesus's fake birthday? Does anyone else celebrate the eve of their fake birthday?

Low effort rookie huh...
You supposed to celebrate the 12 days leading up to it.

This question doesnt make sense to me.

If youre a Christian or even secular and just like Christmas, then celebrating it will be important. If youre neither of those, then I doubt you care about the holiday, other than maybe getting a day off from work or taking advantage of a sale.

I think you just asked this question to troll.

Lorenzo_2003 posted...

This question doesnt make sense to me.

If youre a Christian or even secular and just like Christmas, then celebrating it will be important. If youre neither of those, then I doubt you care about the holiday, other than maybe getting a day off from work or taking advantage of a sale.

I think you just asked this question to troll.

What you gave is a non-answer. Basically you said it is automatic, and explanation not needed because only trolls ask for it.

Yes and no, while its important to celebrate Jesuss fake birthday its also not important to celebrate Jesuss fake birthday understand now?

Seems this is a good book on the subject:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/122132/the-battle-for-christmas-by-stephen-nissenbaum/

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST Drawing on a wealth of research, this fascinating book (The New York Times Book Review) charts the invention of our current Yuletide traditions, from St. Nicholas to the Christmas tree and, perhaps most radically, the practice of giving gifts to children.

Anyone who laments the excesses of Christmas might consider the Puritans of colonial Massachusetts: they simply outlawed the holiday. The Puritans had their reasons, since Christmas was once an occasion for drunkenness and riot, when poor wassailers extorted food and drink from the well-to-do. In this intriguing and innovative work of social history, Stephen Nissenbaum rediscovers Christmass carnival origins and shows how it was transformed, during the nineteenth century, into a festival of domesticity and consumerism.

Bursting with detail, filled with subversive readings of such seasonal classics as A Visit from St. Nicholas and A Christmas Carol, The Battle for Christmas captures the glorious strangeness of the past even as it helps us better understand our present.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/12/why-people-give-christmas-gifts/421908/

It began during the first half of the 1800s, particularly in New York City, and was part of a broader transformation of Christmas from a time of public revelry into a home- and child-centered holiday.

This reinvention was driven partly by commercial interests, but more powerfully by the converging anxieties of social elites and middle-class parents in rapidly urbanizing communities who sought to exert control over the bewildering changes occurring in their cities. By establishing a new type of midwinter celebration that integrated home, family, and shopping, these Americans strengthened an emerging bond between Protestantism and consumer capitalism.

In his book The Battle for Christmas, the historian Stephen Nissenbaum presents the 19th-century reinvention of the holiday as a triumph of New Yorks elites over the citys emerging working classes. New Yorks population grew nearly tenfold from 1800 to 1850, and during that time elites became increasingly frightened of traditional December rituals of social inversion, in which poorer people could demand food and drink from the wealthy and celebrate in the streets, abandoning established social constraints much like on Halloween night or New Years Eve. These rituals, which occurred any time between St. Nicholas Day (a Catholic feast day observed in Europe on December 6) and New Years Day, had for centuries been a means of relieving European peasants (or American slaves) discontent during the traditional downtime of the agricultural cycle. In a newly congested urban environment, though, aristocrats worried that such celebrations might become vehicles for protest when employers refused to give workers time off during the holidays or when a long winter of unemployment loomed for seasonal laborers.

In response to these concerns, a group of wealthy men who called themselves the Knickerbockers invented a new series of traditions for this time of year that gradually moved Christmas celebrations out of the citys streets and into its homes. They presented these traditions as a reinvigoration of Dutch customs practiced in New Amsterdam and New York during the colonial period, although Nissenbaum and other scholars have established that these supposed antecedents largely did not exist in North America. Drawing from two story collections by Washington Irving, their most well-known member, these New Yorkers experimented with domestic festivities on Saint Nicholas Day and New Years Day until another member of the group, Clement Clarke Moore, solidified the tradition of celebrating on Christmas with his enormously popular poem A Visit from St. Nicholas (better known as The Night Before Christmas) in 1823.

The Saint Nicholas that Moore presented in his famous poem was not a wholesale invention, but like the other traditions the Knickerbockers borrowed and transformed, he was not a well-established part of New Yorks winter holiday rituals. Similarly, his delivery of presents to children aligned with a newly emerging practice in 1820s New York, although the giving of homemade gifts during the winter holidays appears to have begun by the late 1700s. Moores poem does not explain why children are receiving presents on Christmas, although they clearly have the expectation of receiving special treats (visions of sugar plums danced in their heads).

WingsOfGood posted...

What you gave is a non-answer. Basically you said it is automatic, and explanation not needed because only trolls ask for it.

No.

If youre a Christian, then Christmas is arguably the most important day to celebrate, barring Easter Sunday.

If youre not a Christian, then you can still take advantage of the holidays benefits or you can simply not care at all.

This question can have different answers and different explanations for them. Why dont you start by letting us know if youre a Christian or not.

Lorenzo_2003 posted...

If youre a Christian, then Christmas is arguably the most important day to celebrate, barring Easter Sunday.

Umm...that would be extremely incorrect.

Lorenzo_2003 posted...

If youre not a Christian, then you can still take advantage of the holidays benefits or you can simply not care at all.

I suppose this is true but at the same time you would probably be more aware of the actual origins.

cont.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/12/why-people-give-christmas-gifts/421908/

Understanding why giving gifts to children (and by gradual extension, to adults) became part of this new Christmas tradition requires an expansion of Nissenbaums story. The Battle for Christmas focuses on the tensions between New Yorks elites and its working classes, but during this same period, a middle class began to emerge in New York and other northern cities, and the reinvention of Christmas served their purposes as well. Like their wealthier contemporaries, middle-class families worried about what rapid population growth and expanding market capitalism would do to their childrenparticularly because an expansion of goods and services on offer was reducing young peoples household responsibilities at a time when alternative pathways to adulthood, such as public education, had yet to emerge.

In response to the increasing uncertainty surrounding this stage of life, urban families that aspired to prepare their children for life in the middle and upper ranks of American society widely adopted new strategies for child rearing. As work and home became increasingly separated for these families, parents kept children within the home (or at church or in school) as long as possible in order to avoid what many of them perceived as the corrupting influences of commerce on kids inchoate moral character. Elites efforts to domesticate Christmas aligned neatly with these parents interests, for they encouraged young Americans to associate the joys of the holiday with the morally and physically protective space of home.

Meanwhile, even if parents were concerned about commercial influences outside the home, they were not bothered by the idea of letting childrens commodities into it, in limited doses. In the 1820s, an American toy industry began to emerge, and American publishers started producing books and magazines for children. (The first three self-sustaining childrens magazines in U.S. history debuted from 1823 to 1827.) Much of the initial demand for these items reflected parents recognition of the instructional power of consumer goods. As an 1824 review of the evangelical childrens magazine The Youths Friend noted,

If early-19th-century newspaper ads promoting Bibles as childrens Christmas gifts are any indication, parents during this era seem to have retained a similar focus on delivering spiritual value to their children. After the Civil War, the spread of consumer products in American cities made it increasingly difficult to control childrens access to toys, books, and magazines, so in order to keep young people at home, parents gradually acquiesced to purchasing products intended to amuse as well as instruct their offspring.

Postbellum Christmas traditions followed this broader trend by becoming more child-focused, particularly through the reconstructed image of Saint Nicholas. Clement Clarke Moores Saint Nick was an elf who was jolly but also a bit scary (as indicated by the narrators repeated reminder that he had nothing to dread).

During the 1860s, the cartoonist Thomas Nast created a new image of Santa Claus that replaced this ambiguous figure with a warm, grandfatherly character who often appeared with his arms full of dolls, games, and other secular toys. One of the earliest publications in which Nasts Santa figure appeared was the December 1868 issue of the magazine Hearth and Home.

Christmas gift-giving, then, is the product of overlapping interests between elites who wanted to move raucous celebrations out of the streets and into homes, and families who simultaneously wanted to keep their children safe at home and expose them, in limited amounts, to commercial entertainment. Retailers certainly supported and benefited from this implicit alliance, but not until the turn of the 20th century did they assume a proactive role of marketing directly to children in the hopes that they might entice (or annoy) their parents into spending more money on what was already a well-established practice of Christmas gift-giving.

WingsOfGood posted...

Low effort rookie huh...
You supposed to celebrate the 12 days leading up to it.

Maybe, but the famous 12 Days of Christmas are the days AFTER Christmas leading up to the Day of the Kings on January 6.

I voted Who Cares, btw.

Sariana21 posted...

Maybe, but the famous 12 Days of Christmas are the days AFTER Christmas leading up to the Day of the Kings on January 6.

I voted Who Cares, btw.

oh I didn't know that

Day of Kings? I will have to look that up.