This year our Christmas is on the 20th

To our family, Christmas is the time for reunions. When the children were still young and we were exiles in London, there was no problem of worrying who would come or who would not come. The plate settings were as it would be on any ordinary day – my late husband, our five children and myself. It was not a reunion but a special dinner.

In London we celebrated with a dinner of wild turkey that was available from Selfridges (just two blocks away from where we lived) double-smoked Irish ham (best ham I have ever tasted) paired with freshly baked baguettes, cheese, fruits and nuts. For a long time, it was frantic shopping for Santa (that’s me, of course) believing that the children still believed he came from Norway or some far-away in sleigh run by reindeers.

But Christmases have changed. We still try to be at a place we could have a meal together. That will happen over the weekend way before the traditional Christmas day on the 25th. A daughter, Veronica is flying from London via Bangkok to Manila, another daughter, Marta flew in from Hong Kong, and another son Eduardo from Singapore. Food was no longer important. Marta insisted that we prepare daily Filipino food like arroz caldo and fried vegetable lumpia. She could not bear it if she were to be eat turkey for the third time. Happy to fulfill her wish. Her husband, Simon from England asked for adobo. A daughter-in-law Dimples from Ormoc is bringing Cebu lechon. More important was to catch up with each other’s life, exchange stories on the good and bad times since the last Christmas. But we need not apologize if we celebrate Christmas on some other date than Dec. 25th if even church authorities do not really know the correct date.

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Herbert W. Armstrong wrote the origins of our Christmas celebrations are pagan. He debunks most of the practices that have been taken as gospel truth.

“Christmas has become a commercial season. It’s sponsored, kept alive, by the heaviest retail advertising campaigns of the year. You see a masqueraded ‘Santa Claus’ in many stores. Ads keep us deluded and deceived about the ‘beautiful Christmas spirit.’ The newspapers, that sell the ads, print flowery editorials exalting and eulogizing the pagan season, and its ‘spirit.’ A gullible people has become so inoculated, many take offense when told the truth. But the ‘Christmas spirit’ is created each year, not to honor Christ, but to sell merchandise! Like all Satan’s delusions, it appears as an ‘angel of light,’ is made to appear good. Billions of dollars are spent in this merchandising spree every year, while the cause of Christ must suffer! It’s part of the economic system of Babylon!

“We have professed to be Christian nations, but we’re in Babylon, as Bible prophecy foretold, and we don’t know it! ‘Come out of her, my people, that you be not partakers of her sins, and that you receive not of her plagues’ – now soon to fall – is the warning of Revelation 18:4 [emphasis mine].

The Encyclopedia Americana, 1956 edition, adds, “Christmas…was not observed in the first centuries of the Christian church, since the Christian usage in general was to celebrate the death of remarkable persons rather than their birth…a feast was established in memory of this event Christ’s birth in the 4th century. In the 5th century the Western church ordered the feast to be celebrated on the day of the Mithraic rites of the birth of the sun and at the close of the Saturnalia, as no certain knowledge of the day of Christ’s birth existed.”

It was 300 years after Christ before the Roman church kept Christmas, and not until the fifth century that it was mandated to be kept throughout the empire as an official festival honoring “Christ.”

The most common justification that one will hear regarding Christmas is that people have replaced old pagan customs and intents by asserting that they are now “focusing on Christ.” I have heard many say that they are “honoring Christ” in their Christmas-keeping. The problem is that God does not say this is acceptable to Him! Actually, He plainly commands against it! Keeping Christmas dishonors Christ! He considers everything about it to be an abomination! We will soon see why.

Christ said, “But in vain they do worship Me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men” (Matt. 15:9). Christmas is not a command of God – it is a tradition of men. Christ continued, “Full well you reject the commandment of God, that you may keep your own tradition” (Mark 7:9). Every year, throughout the world, on Dec. 25th, hundreds of millions do just that!

We will see that God plainly commands, “Follow not the way of the heathen.” But most people do not fear God, and He allows them to make their own decisions. Human beings are free moral agents – free to obey or disobey God! But woe to those who ignore the plain Word of God!

Christ was born in the fall of the year. Many have mistakenly believed He was born around the beginning of winter– December 25th! They are wrong! Notice the Adam Clarke Commentary, volume 5, page 370, New York edition: “It was custom among Jews to send out their sheep to the deserts about the Passover [early spring], and bring them home at the commencement of the first rain.” The first rains began in early-to-mid fall. Continuing with this same quote: “During the time they were out, the shepherds watched them night and day. As…the first rain began early in the month of March-esvan, which answers to part of our October and November [begins sometime in October], we find that the sheep were kept out in the open country during the whole summer. And as these shepherds had not yet brought home their flocks, it is a presumptive argument that October had not yet commenced, and that, consequently, our Lord was not born on the 25th of December, when no flocks were out in the fields; nor could He have been born later than September, as the flocks were still in the fields by night. On this very ground, the nativity in December should be given up. The feeding of the flocks by night in the fields is a chronological fact…See the quotations from the Talmudists in Lightfoot.”

 “This year, instead of gift-trading, why not put that money into God’s Work?”