Exploratory Essay About Christmas

Over these past seven weeks we have gone over a large amount of material. Starting from the basics of understanding how to interpret meanings in the bible, all the way up to the time when the barbarians were invading the European countries. I was not expecting this type of background information for this course. Back when I was scheduling in April, I was super excited to take this course (and still am). I figured I would learn interesting information about Christmas, my favorite holiday, but little did I know the surprises that would come… Taking this course I really was not expecting all the surprises from the information we have learned. First of all, I knew December 25th was not actually Jesus’ true birthday. I knew that Christmas was a …show more content…
This was thought to be the date of Christ’s death, but it could only be the birth date of Christ if Christians believed in the Jewish notion that there are exact years between birth and death. As we know from this class, Christians did not like Jewish traditions/beliefs. So this again was a failure. Another try used March 28, the date for the creation of the sun as Jesus’ birthday. They felt this could work because Jesus is the “sun of righteousness” (Malachi 4:2). Comparing Jesus and sun imagery is also used in the New Testament in multiple gospels. However, people felt that this date was not specific enough so again this idea had to be discarded. An idea created by Julius Africanus stated that Jesus was incarnate at his conception on March 25, the creation of the world. If you add nine months to this date, it becomes December 25. This only works if Christians followed the Jewish idea of exact years. One last way was using the Julien calendar to find the birthday of the sun, which happened to be December 25. This seems plausible since Jesus is compared to or thought to be the sun so it makes sense for the birthdays of the sun and Jesus be the same. It took many, many years to determine the date, and all the factors above added to the Christians trying to counter-act pagan feasts helped the process. Since this process was very complex in itself, it added complexity to the background …show more content…
When I heard this I was shocked, I always figured saints were individuals that the Christian faith created to help us in our daily lives. Hearing and seeing evidence that St. Nick was real, made me re-think that there is a possibility that other saints were real as well. Now the actual date of his birth is unknown, but what is known was that he was a bishop in the city of Myra in the fourth century. It is believed that he died on December 6, and this is thought to be true since the church recorded when important figures like bishops passed away. Most of the information on St. Nick comes from legends passed down through the centuries but since there is record of his death, this tells us that he was in fact a real human being. His legend started out as him being the savior to sailors who prayed to him for help on the rough waters by the seaport of Myra. Since he helped the sailors, St. Nick became the patron of the helpless. This included individuals who were incriminated but where actually innocent. The legend goes that St. Nick would help those individuals that were thought to be guilty find evidence that would prove their innocence. The legend that ties into today’s idea of St. Nick is that he was also the patron of children. He is thought to have brought back to live three boys who were murdered. This idea made him the patron of kids which is how we see him