Remember what you are celebrating

Ah the beauty and fun of winter holidays!  Festive attitudes, the music, the various family oriented traditions are all enjoyable and undoubtedly conform to mean exactly what we intend: a familial warmth where we share together what is most important to us. But from where do these traditions find their origin, most notably, I am thinking about Chanukah and Christmas?

Before delving into Christmas, I thought I would start with Chanukah.

The celebration of Chanukah is different from many other Jewish holidays / traditions set apart by the fact that, by tradition, it is not a spiritual holiday nor is it accompanied by a reprieve from working. The history is an festive remembrance of a military victory between the first and second century BC.

To offer a little more history, Jerusalem was a bit of a ravished community, found between two very militarily endowed communities, Egypt and Syria, which traded battles to rule over the city.  The Greek influence at the time suppressed the celebration of Jewish holidays, rituals or traditions and resulted in the desecration of the temple.  An uprising resulted in the liberation of the Jewish community including the liberating of the Temple of the various Greek statues that had co-opted the purpose of the temple. With this renewed freedom, the Jewish community desired to celebrate this miraculous victory by super-imposing the traditions from the Sukkot festival, most literally. The Sukkot festival lasted eight days.

In the hybrid Christian traditional view of Christmas,

one might think that the baby Jesus was born in a feed-trough below a glowing Christmas tree, or something like that. The reality is that, not unlike Chanukah, the Christian community attempted to redeem the Winter Solstice festival by super-imposing the birth of Christ into that timeframe.  I feel confident that when Christians started celebrating the birth of Christ during the Winter Solstice, it was probably a completely segregated event from the odd traditions celebrated during the Winter Solstice. But as time passed, and the tradition passed along from generation to generation, many Christian and non-Christian traditions became blurred together in a way that some consider a bit offensive ( more on that in a bit ). Not so surprisingly, Chanukah carries with it some of these same little gotchas.

Considering the fact that at first, Chanukah was a festival celebrating a military victory ( think “Independence Day” ).  That festival lasted eight days ( like I already said ).  Somewhere along the way, a few stories were recorded about a miracle that happened during the liberating of the temple.  The story is a tradition and not found in Christian or Jewish scripture, and goes something like this:

The Maccabees who liberated the temple ( that part is true ) found a Menorah ( Menorah is traditionally a six or seven candle, candelabra ) and enough oil to burn for a single day, but a miracle happened which let it burn long enough to square away enough oil to keep the Menorah burning until the Temple rededication ceremony! Regardless of the miracle story of the oil, Menorahs and candle lighting are very often found in many Jewish celebrations and remembrances. So about  five hundred years later, Chanukah along with many other holidays and festivals are becoming forgotten.  Here come some folks who then are concerned that these celebrations will be lost and so around 300 AD Chanukah was reborn with an emphasis on the miracle oil story, the military story slightly reduced in festive significance, and specifically the Hanukiah introduced ( a 9 candle Menorah: understand, not all Menorahs are Hanukiahs, but all Hanukiahs are Menorahs ). More time goes by and the three blessings prayers, in Hebrew, were introduced as well as the recitation of remembrance called “these lights” which recalls the military victory in a smaller form in the middle of a larger remembrance of how God brings salvation again and again in times of need. Later the Jewish people of Spain add a reading from Psalms, chapter 30 and added the Sufganiot food to the festival.

Going forward the tradition hits Germany where the Dreidel is “redeemed” from what was likely once a gambling game, now winning candy or fruit made to look like coins. This is also where the other German-Jewish foods are introduced into the holiday celebration, like Latkes. And finally, in the 1990s a brick was tossed through the window of an American kid who posted a picture of a Hanukiah in the window. This bolstered the celebration of Chanukah in the US, which is where it is said the tradition of giving gifts was widely adopted ( likely in reaction of American Christmas gift-giving, which was a reaction to Winter-Solstice traditions by Christians over the ages ).

Why in the world am I sharing this? 

Well, because it is often said that the Christian Christmas is being lost in a bluster of crass materialism blurred into a bunch of traditions originally celebrated as part of a pagan solstice celebration. I don’t disagree with that, other than to say that one could celebrate the birth of Jesus without the materialism and pagan traditions. The fact is, we don’t have a birthday for Jesus and so while we can make some fair guesses that might be better than conveniently landing around Winter Solstice, he is a bit like an orphan without a birth certificate ( in that sense ) and so we picked a day and started celebrating. Likewise, a Chanukah celebrator could focus on the “independence day” aspects of the remembrance rather than the 500-year later traditions of Spanish spiritualizing and german food along with North American and Winter Solstice-reactionary gift-giving traditions as well.

Alternatively, we could just continue to remember the purpose for these celebrations, regardless of the day they are on or their co-opted traditions added hundreds of years later. I honestly feel that while there are some obvious traditions that are not redeemable ( Pagan temple sex being one of them ), there are many that can be redeemed.  An example of this can be found in 1 Corinthians 10, where Paul encourages the believer to eat food sold in the market place regardless of whether or not it had been dedicated to another god through some ritual. Having said that, if you are being invited to join into a celebration of another god, Paul says we shouldn’t join in (or buy or eat that meat).

Today I see the world beckoning me to join them in their commercialism at Christmas time. I have no problem buying a gift AND avoiding entering into the crass commercialism. I don’t see people asking me to setup a solstice phallic symbol and dance around it, asking pagan gods to bless the earth. If I were invited, I would take the advice of Biblical Paul and not join in. Likewise, if Jewish friends invited me to a Chanukah party and asked me to bring a gift for some of the young kids, I could recite the history about it being a co-opted tradition having nothing today to do with celebrating an independance-style military victory fashioned after the Sukkot / Hechog which explicitly celebrates a break from materialism and dependence on the provision of God. I don’t think I would say that however. For one, it wouldn't be true for everyone.  They may be celebrating that victorious history AND giving gifts, regardless of where the gift giving tradition is based. I can say that there is nothing “uneatable” about the modern traditions that are well-removed (if not redeemed) from their goofy histories within either of these now-modern celebrations.

Final Footnote: While a traditional Chanukah celebration felt more like the 4^th of July and was celebrated like Thanksgiving ( since it was based on the 8-day festival of Sukkot ), the modern celebration is more like a Christmas / solstice mash-up with a bit of German Yiddish and Spanish spiritual tradition thrown in. I imagine Jesus may have celebrated a traditional Independance+Thanksgiving Chanukah and not the modern version. Christmas, however, was a complete reaction to the solstice holiday in an effort to give Christians something to celebrate while the pagans danced around outside in the snow. The same way modern Israel outlived the Hellenistic Jews and the more mystical traditions found in the now-abandoned stories of the Septuagint ( worthy of note, there are more similarities between the Septuagint stories of the Maccabees describing the liberating of the temple later celebrated in Chanukah, during the inter-testamental period than are found anywhere else in the Bible ) the Christian Christmas outlived any actual Winter Solstice pagan celebrations. All of that to ask, what are you celebrating? Are you celebrating a significant event in Jewish independence?  Have you co-opted that holiday with other modern more-spiritual traditions? Have you co-opted that tradition with crass commercialism? Are you celebrating Christmas, co-opting the timeframe of a Winter Solstice celebration, trading it in for an opportunity to be thankful that Jesus made a sacrifice, willing to be born and later bear our sins in His death and resurrection? Have you co-opted that remembrance with crass commercialism?   

Don’t forget what you are celebrating. In fact, GO GET YOUR CELEBRATION ON!