Christmas & Holy Time, Seasons of Scrutiny (Part I )

- Growing Up In Southern Presbyterian Tinsel –
(Things My Church Should Have Told Me)

“Everything that I command you, you shall be careful to do. You shall not add to it or take from it.” (Deut. 12:32, ESV)
“Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.” (1 Thess. 5:21, KJV)
“To his own master he stands or falls; and he will stand, for the Lord is able to make him stand. One person regards one day above another, another regards every day alike. Each person must be fully convinced in his own mind. He who observes the day, observes it for the Lord…” (Romans 14: 4b-6a, NASB)

Falling flakes of cold, crisp snow, scented pine or evergreen spruce, coloured ribboned wrappings, stirrings of special gatherings and musical wonders, and oh, those sparkling evening lights, as if the stars had come from heaven and decorated the towne. I could lay for an hour or more with my eyes gleaming up through the flickering tinselled branches of brightly coloured bulbs and reflective ornament of our Christmas tree. As a child, I was read the Holy Scriptures of the glorious gift of the child Christ, and I was smothered in an overwhelming array of seemingly endless toys, nearly as magnificent as the enormous cardboard box that, like clockwork, yearly arrived from the white-bearded dude as our family gained new appliances – a refrigerator, a washer, a dryer, a television set… We three kids could always depend on mom’s large box, no matter the weight for reindeer sleigh, as surely as we could a Sunday box of raisins from grandma.

Did I say I grew up in a conservative Presbyterian church in the South, one that battled liberalism in the PCUS for decades, to finally help found the PCA; and where no official pronouncement concerning Christmas was forthcoming from the General Assembly?

I probably should have begun this tale there. Either there, or with my reading of a book in my youth about a young Jewish artist, My Name is Asher Lev. As a Hasidic Jew with a contentious artistic talent, Asher wasn’t as much faced with Christmas as with Easter (what we Old Schoolers might call Passover, Peasch, or forward to Resurrection Sunday) or more specifically the raw suffering expressed in the symbolism of the Passion, the crucifixion of Christ, which depiction in the masterpiece of his painting was in stark conflict with the strict soul of Asher’s Jewish tradition, ripe with its own suffering. Yes, there are parallels between Puritanism and Hasidic Judaism, where both have in austerity frowned upon the value of art and favoured a more pragmatic and ‘responsible’ devotion of life to the love and fear of God; but it was the conflict of image in a Jewish obsession with the powerful symbolism of Christ’s crucifixion that pierced my own soul in considering where Jesus Himself is impassioned in devotion to the Father beyond all manufactured trappings of man. If Christmas be found to be the latter, some decoration forced into sacrament, so much paint and brush become popular tradition, then devotion to the love and fear of God demands we honour God’s command of worship above any such tradition of man.

My church never told me about Christmas, we simply plunged into popular assent as though we’d been doing so for centuries. There were cantatas and programs and lighted trees with presents, and so many parties it was hard to take them all in. But most of the really holy stuff was always reserved for Sundays, with no thought of a Christmas Eve or Christmas day service. Of course there was a clear explanation of “the first Christmas”, a myriad retelling of “the Christmas story”, the birth of Jesus as especially given in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Still, it would only be as an adult I would be told about Christmas, probably first by a heretical Jehovah’s Witness.

Pagan Calendar of Days

Years after joyous ministerial carolling in area hospitals and retirement homes, after carrying food baskets to shut-ins, after can drives for the homeless and gift drives making sure all little children had some present Christmas morning, I was brought face-to-face with Christmas; and of all places it was before the Session regarding Halloween. You see, not even in four years at the conservative denomination’s own college was any direction forthcoming on what was to be done with Christmas. But while I was away at school Halloween had hit the headlines with harming of kids and warnings to parents. Like many churches across the nation, some ‘safe’ alternative was proffered for All Hallow’s Evening, ours with ‘Reformation party’ overtones. But wouldn’t you know it, little ghosts and witches turned up just the same, and the Session was in a quandary what to do. All the years of my youth were played out with our church’s approval of Easter eggs hunts, Santa visits, and even trick-or-treating with the elder’s children, but pint-sized witches in the fellowship hall on Halloween was clearly a step too far. Suddenly the Jehovah’s Witness strategy was looking better.

As a returning youth director I was oddly left to sort it all out, and sort it out I did, but not for the church and not for our Session, who remained somewhat stumped and shell-shocked. Oh, I was asked to preach on my views and offer some guidance, especially as ‘youth activities’ now came under my ‘discretion’, but all of us were left with heads hanging over what had become of our once great bastion of Presbyterian conservatism.

Christmas, however, was far too engrained to “go quietly into that good night” (Dylan Thomas). Though not as ancient of Christian origins as All Hallow’s Evening (this author’s perspective), Christmas, after all, surely focused on the birth of Jesus the Christ, and as such was almost universally hailed as Presbyterian worthy, despite its trappings and modern adaptation into American Presbyterianism. But ought it so to be? Is there a substantive difference between justifications for an observance of Christmas and that of Hallowe’en?

I’ll cover some spattering of my views as I continue this series on Christmas & Holy Time, next focusing somewhat on origins of Christian Sabbath and the Church Year. I say somewhat, because there’s an inundation of valid Internet source material on such origins with no need for me to repeat in commentary, but I’d like to address some Biblical foundations of observance, leaving the Regulative Principle of Worship (RPW) to it’s own blog post, and delve a bit into the psyche of Christmas origin which tends to reinvigorate modern Presbyterian observance.

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“We are not in this matter to stand either by our own or by other men’s judgments. We must listen to the voice of God, and hear in what estimation he holds that profanation of worship which is displayed when men, overleaping the boundaries of His Word, run riot in their own inventions.” – John Calvin, Tracts (1844; reprint, Baker Publishing House, 1983), Vol. 1, pp. 189-90.

“But the acceptable way of worshiping the true God is instituted by Himself, and so limited by His own revealed will, that He may not be worshiped according to the imaginations and devices of men, or the suggestions of Satan, under any visible representation, or any other way not prescribed in the Holy Scripture.”  - Westminster Confession of Faith (XXI:1)

This series: “Christmas & Holy Time, Seasons of Scrutiny” (Part I, II, III, IV, V).