Christians Fight Back in the War Against Christmas

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Christmas doesn't have anything to do with Christianity. According to the history books I read, it started 4,000 years ago as a celebration of the winter solstice. The Romans called it Saturnalia. It was a very popular holiday that everyone celebrated. People partied, got drunk, had sex, and worshipped the Sun. From what I understand, the Catholic Church condemned the holiday as immoral. They wanted to increase membership but people didn't want to give up celebrating the holiday so they basically created an identical holiday with a different name called Christmas (which means mass of Christ, a Catholic mass to celebrate Christ's birth). They prohibited the most sinful parts (drunkenness and adultery) and gave new meanings to the pagan customs. People debated then whether the Church did the right thing. Eventually everyone joined the Church and Christmas replaced the winter solstice celebration. When the Puritans came to America, they actually made it illegal to celebrate Christmas because they said it is an immoral holiday. After the Civil War, Sears and other companies commercialized Christmas and make it more civilized and acceptable as a family holiday. I don't think it became a national holiday until the 1900s.

It's funny for me to hear Christians fighting to put Christ back into Christmas because before it was commercialized it was more like a large party that most Christians condemned as immoral.

I hope my post above doesn't offend anybody. Someone told me of the origins and I had to research the history to see if he was right and I think it's interesting where it came from.

If your whole family celebrates Christmas and you don't, then you feel left out. I think the Church wanted to allow people to continue celebrating so they would have one less obstacle to joining the church. They could celebrate most of the holiday so they wouldn't feel left out. They'd just have different meanings behind what they were doing. I'm not saying it's immoral. I'm not God so I really don't know.

For the person who asked about Xmas, I think X is the first letter in Christ's name when it's spelled in Greek. I don't know why people shorten it or when the Xmas abbreviation started.

Merry Yuletide everyone, and a Happy Hogmanay (even though I'm not Scots, but I go along with the Celtic part of it).

Did no one else even notice the most amazing part of the OP's story? A solitary Muslim saved 4 Jews from a horde of violent Christians. I for one believe most religions beget intolerance, and so while the first part of the story is sad but typical of religion, the second part is hopeful. But then again, I bet none of the people involved had an epiphany as to how divisive and intolerant religion is, and they all still believe their faith is "right" and the others are all doomed to some sort of hell for believing something slightly different.

To the point:

If you are offended by someone saying "Happy holidays," you are an idiot.

If you are offended by someone saying "Happy Hanukkah," you are a bigoted idiot.

If you are offended by someone saying "Merry Christmas," you are also an idiot.

If you are willing to start an enormous fight with words or fists over a simple seasonal greeting, you are an humongous, apocalyptically stupid idiot who presumably has no life.

OMG, there are more important things in life!

Isn't it funny how Fox, amidst all it's networks and publishing, the news is the only conservative facet of it's medium..? It's seems to be pandering to the public with guile.

If you ask me...

True enough, you have talk radio all across the board as well as a few one hour conservative talk show hosts now on other networks after the market was forced opened and they felt they needed to stay relevant (Glenn Beck on MSNBC for example). On the other hand have you ever heard of the 'fairness' doctrine? Its creepy the extent some people are trying to go to in order to squash that for their own special version of free speech.