Christmas is the Most Joyous Time of the Year

I love Christmas! I love to decorate my house and make everything sparkle and shine. I love to smell pine needles and all the scents of Christmas. I even love wrapping gifts, even though I’m not very good at it. I can spend hours driving around just looking at the lights. Christmas makes me happy, not for the gifts, although they are nice, but because I get to spend the day with my family on the best holiday of the year; the joyous celebration of our Savior! I also enjoy seeing what gifts everyone received and, of course, the food. And, to top it all off, I get to gorge myself on Hallmark Christmas movies. I have to admit that I started watching them on October 31, but I never get tired of them and will watch repeats over and over again. I even watch them in the summer when Lifetime has its weeklong “Christmas in July” special. 

 

I love Christmas so much I even know the history of how Christmas became Christmas. One interesting fact is Christmas wasn’t declared a federal holiday until June 26, 1870. That doesn’t seem like very long considering Jesus walked the earth more than 2,000 years ago. Pope Julius I chose December 25 as the day to celebrate the birth of Jesus, but it wasn’t called Christmas then. It was called the Feast of the Nativity. It is believed that the church chose this date to coincide with the pagan Saturnalia Festival to increase the odds that Christmas would become popular and catch on. If this is true, it certainly worked. I personally think it caught on so well because family life was hard and it gave parents an excuse to give gifts to their children without it appearing to spoil them.  If you were fortunate or unfortunate enough, depending upon your point of view, to be born during this time, you would have partied like a rock star because Christmas was celebrated then like Mardi Gras is celebrated today. It was so bad, at least by early American Puritan standards, that Christmas (before it was declared a federal holiday) was actually outlawed in Boston from 1659 to 1681. Today’s Christmas is pretty tame by those standards.

Christmas is the most joyous time of the year! No matter how you choose to celebrate Christmas, do it with love. Life is too short to hold grudges and harbor ill will. Truly be present and enjoy this special time of year with your family and friends.

 

Have a Blessed and Merry Christmas.