Christians Are Blissfully Unaware Their Christmas Trees Are Pagan AF
And so are most Christmas traditions!
Local Evangelical Chris Bradshaw is now a three-time winner of his neighborhood’s annual Christmas Tree Competition for “Best-In-Show,” and he spent the morning looking at his Christmas tree making some last-minute ornament rearrangements and adjustments to the colored light strands to improve the tree’s glow.
“I just love how Christian our Christmas traditions are, and how they’re totally reverent to God, Jesus, the Virgin Mary, Joseph, the Three Wise Men, and of Christianity in general. Yep, there is certainly nothing pagan about Christmas trees. Nothing pagan at all! There’s just no way the symbolism of contemporary Christians bringing a giant tree into the house had anything to do with, say, ancient Egyptians using green palms to worship Ra, or ancient Romans using fir trees to celebrate Saturnalia, or pagan Germans and Scandinavian Vikings in the single-digit centuries worshipping Thor and other deities via oak trees — no way! Christmas trees are totally an original Christian concept. Definitely not some kind of convenient adoption of ancient rituals revolving around the end of the farming season on the day of winter solstice appropriated into Christianity to more easily convert pagans with comfortable and familiar customs with which the pagans were already celebrating. No siree! And I’m sure the whole tradition of gift-giving has nothing to do with the Roman custom of giving gifts during their December holiday of Saturnalia, or the gift-giving of the Germanic tribes in the north. I bet the gift-giving character of Santa Claus and his original eight reindeer pre-Rudolph have no pagan predecessor either. Nope, definitely no relation to the Norse god Odin, who dispensed gifts to children on his eight-legged horse Sleipnir, and who the children would leave out carrots and hay for in their boots left out in front of the chimney in exchange for candy. And I don’t believe for a second that all the Christmas carols have their roots in paganism, or that singing for and with one’s neighbors in December has gone on since before recorded history. Or that the ancient songs sung for the winter solstice, like the tradition of villagers trekking into orchards or forests singing to wake up the sleeping trees and induce the coming of spring and a bountiful harvest for the next year, had anything to do with the evolution of carols. Or the Old English walking from house to house wassailing, and exchanging gulps of alcoholic drinks for money. And who doesn’t love putting up mistletoe in the house? There’s no way I’ll ever believe mistletoe was a familiar plant with great significance for fertility, love, and peace in the pre-Christian world ranging from Rome all the way to the Celts and Norse druids. And always make sure to put up holly and wreaths on all your doors. There’s no way that’s a custom that was appropriated from Rome’s Saturnalia! And all the Christmas iconography we’re so nostalgic for today isn’t, if you think about it, that closely sourced from Charles Dickens’s fictional A Christmas Carol. And the fat, white haired and bearded Santa dressed in all red is definitely not just subliminal brainwashing from decades of secular corporate advertising and seasonal marketing campaigns capitalistically innovating how to appropriate religious sentiments to convince us we need to spend a lot of money and buy a bunch of various products for ourselves and our families and friends for the holidays. And I will never believe for a second that lots of Biblically contemporary and even earlier cultures and religious cults detailed cosmically miraculous, prophesied virgin births. Only Christianity! Yep, Christmas must be the most original holiday ever invented, untainted and unvarnished by any and all pagan influences. Totally sui generis! Now, if you’ll excuse me, me and my family are going to go eat a yule log. I don’t know where the word ‘yule’ comes from, but I’m sure it wasn’t pagan at all, and it definitely is derived from some custom native to the United States of America!”
Congratulations on another award-winning Christmas tree, Chris. 🥃
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