The Great Christmas Myth

By James Donahue

Here we are once again, caught up in the tumult of another commercialized Christian holiday season. Hordes are clogging the stores on the seasonal rush to buy gifts for the family, loved ones and co-workers. The stores are cluttered with the gaudy sparkle of false cheer while our brains are bombarded with the worn out Christmas songs.

Billions of great healthy evergreen trees are sacrificed to be raised on stands in homes, stores and business places and decorated with gaudy lights, sparkly balls and false ice cycles. And there is the traditional star blazing away at the tip of every tree. Homes and yards are filled with colored lights, nativity scenes and images of Santa Claus riding on a sleigh pulled by reindeer.

People pretend to be happy and filled with seasonal joy. They go around at night singing Christmas carols. There are parties. Lots of bubbly and gift exchanges. It is a time of cheer . . . or is it? Statistics note that there are more suicides during the Christmas season than at any other time of the year. Is it because the joy and happiness we seek is all a false front to how we really think?

The merchants say they depend upon the Christmas rush to put their books in the black each year. Actually it all amounts to a greedy rush to collect more money. The holiday promotion, which begins almost as early as Halloween, is a desperate attempt to entice people to spend more and more money they do not have, on things they do not need. And why are we doing this?

We say, as somewhat of a backdrop to all of the glitter, that Christmas is all about a Christian celebration of the birth of Jesus, the so-called savior of mankind. But saving us from what? From eternal damnation as punishment for living a sinful life. According to the Bible, a book penned by church scholars a couple thousand years ago, we were all born in sin and we can only escape Hell by accepting Jesus as our Lord and Savior.

So just who is this Jesus? The Bible says he is the Son of God, sent to Earth to be a blood sacrifice to cover the sins of only those who believe in Him. But can this be true? Does this mean that all those people who believe in Mohamad, or the Buddha, the Krishna or just don’t choose to accept the Jesus story are all doomed to an eternity in a lake of fire? That includes most of the people who have ever lived on this planet. Can there be a "loving" Creator God who would dish out such penalty for just not accepting the Jesus story? If we were created out of love, why would God set up such a trap for humanity?

When we think it out, there are a lot of reasons why the Christmas story, as told in the Gospels, sounds too fishy to be true. It all involves a woman who gets pregnant while she is still a virgin, travels to Bethlehem with her husband Joseph to pay a Roman imposed tax even though she is not a Roman by birth, is forced to have her baby in a cow barn because the local hotel is crowded when they arrive, and then is visited by shepherds and three kings who are guided by a star in the sky that told them the long prophesized king was born. King of what?

The problem with this story is it is a plagiarized version of stories told about a bunch of holy characters who allegedly arrived before Jesus. Zoroaster, Mithras, Perseus, Horus and Krishna were all said to have born of virgins. How can this have happened? It is biologically impossible, but the story persists.

If Jesus did exist at all, there is no proof that he was born on December 25. It just happens that this date links with ancient sun worshipers as well as the winter solstice, which falls on December 21. The Roman church literally hijacked a pagan festival that fell on December 25 and turned it into their own.

The Gospel stories that tell of the birth of Jesus, give us his ancestry, and describe the miracles surrounding the birth, were written hundreds of years after Jesus allegedly lived. A careful study of the gospels reveals that the stories conflict with each other. Thus the chances are good that they were all fictional stories. It never happened that way.

The addition of Santa Claus to the Christmas story stems from the myth of "Father Christmas," who was derived from the old Anglo-Saxton myth of Woden, a god of magic and healing that rode across the sky on an eight-legged horse. At midwinter, Woden came to earth and entered homes through the smoke-hole to dispense goodwill, peace and presents. The Christians stole the myth when they declared a Fourth Century Turkish bishop named Nicholas a saint. The Americans have since corrupted the name Saint Nicholas into Santa Claus.

We could go on and on with a long list of reasons why the tree, the star and the angel images are part of the Christmas tradition. All have been stolen from ancient pagan beliefs.

What is presented as a holy Christian celebration has really been transposed into a time of drinking, eating and consumption that has little to do with religious beliefs. It is a time of waste and depravity. The party doesn’t stop until New Years Day.