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How Modern Christmas Really Chaps My Hide!

Let’s talk about Christmas. I want to do that because so many don’t even know when the Christmas season is anymore or how Christians prepared and celebrated it for thousands of years. They are confused about the 12 days of Christmas and when it starts and when it ends. This is the fault of not only our retail companies who want it to be all about buying crap but the fault of churches who have abrogated their duties to raise up strong Christians who are capable of waging holy war against perpetrators of evil, murder, death, and mayhem instead of making excuses for evil and evil doers. By standing by and doing nothing, the bible is clear, those deaths are on the heads of those who stood by and did nothing. God will hold them accountable.

If you are a Christian God has called you to be a watchman over His children.

But let’s talk of Christmas.

This is another installment of What Your Father Should Have Taught You – What ARE the 12 Days of Christmas? Your father should have told you as his father should have told him. Mine did, no he wasn’t a priest, he was a staff sergeant during World War II and a Construction worker he did go to college for mechanical engineering…back when college actually taught you to think. He was really big on physics and Natural Law and that we could see who God through these laws which he implemented for our very existence. There was an order to everything, he often said.

But we have lost the reasons for why we do things. Especially Christmas, and what we’ve done to it really chaps my hide.

There are actually a lot of things that I think we would be better off doing like the Victorians did. In many ways they lived intensely but they were also better than us at knowing why they were doing things. OK, neckties and other ways to hide buttons (because they thought people would get overly excited if they saw how to get someone’s clothes off), or table skirts and long table clothes because they thought viewing table legs would make men think of women’s legs and consequently what those legs lead to at the top…those views were probably a bit much. their sexual phobias bordered on the obsessive but it’s not like there is nothing to complain about with our society.

Despite some rather odd beliefs everything they made was beautiful…even warships in the Victorian and Edwardian period and before were beautiful. I saw a dam that was a work of art they didn’t just make things functional they made them beautiful! They believed, as my Dad told me, to do everything I do as if I am doing it in service to my God. Always do my best because God is watching, and he takes pleasure in us doing things well and to the best of our ability. Today my wife and I regularly lament on how bland, straight and sterile modern life and architecture is. We live in a world that is seriously devoid of man-made beauty.

She, my wife, also has chosen to wear Victorian clothes which she enjoys making for her family on 100-year-old sewing machines that still work! Because everything they made back then was made to last. Planned obsolescence is a satanic teaching, there is nothing Biblical about it. My dad hated the junk he sometimes had to buy and talked about how everything used to be fixable and was made to last. The very idea of making things designed to wear out is contrary to biblical teaching where you are to do all as if you do it for God. And, it can be assumed, God doesn’t appreciate junk. If nothing else, it is a massive waste of the resources he put on this world for our benefit. But, as usual, I digress.

The Victorian Age was, perhaps, the last time when Christians on the whole understood the 12 Days of Christmas and therefore the Christmas season.

We like the clothes from that time period because they had class…I still like sweats and t-shirts, but the Victorian night shirt is comfortable and easy to maintain too. We do this because we like it. We like to live and understand our connections to our family’s and our nation’s history. We aren’t fanatical about it. Sometimes I wear my grey cavalry hat with a feather behind the upturned brim and crossed sabers and the 8th Cavalry crest on it and other times I wear my more modern black beret with my 8th Cav crest on it, while still others I wear my “Indiana Jones” Fedora…but I hate being a clone of everyone else. Therefore, I don’t wear baseball or feed caps. Yet the Army conditioned me to wear hats when I’m outside and I still have that habit.

I don’t expect anyone else to do what I do. In fact, I have told all my kids to “be yourself” no matter what others think. You don’t live to please them but to please God and yourself – the only two you can never get away from. They all grew up learning my favorite quote from Friederich Nietzsche that “Why should we strive to be normal. Another word for normal is average and another word for average is mediocre. Should we really strive to be mediocre?” Be yourself you will never do anything great by coping everyone else.

True, some Victorians were quite conformist…except Southern Generals…as one Southern woman said, “We prefer our generals to be a bit eccentric.” But the way Victorians and Southern Generals worshipped tended to have the same class and intensity of everything else they did. The armies actually stopped fighting for Christmas! Stonewall Jackson, the few times he was required to fight on Sunday he required all his soldiers and officers to show up at worship the following day! The Confederate Army experienced massive revivals during the Civil War. “They still lost” you might say. Yeah, but as Gary Gallagher has pointed out in several of his books: the amazing thing is the South not only held out for so long in their war, but they almost won at several points – where if you looked at the odds they should have been crushed. The US Army (at least since Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Dwight D. Eisenhower have left the service,) is not going to say, “the way to win battles is to be on the right side with God.” Jackson and Lee and Chamberlain for that matter were obsessive about doing things “the right way,” and reacting as God would have wanted them to do. They were men of faith and Christmas was a big part of their lives.

But what have we done to our faith today? Let’s look at that by looking at Christmas and what it is supposed to be.

First I want to tell you a story from my life. It highlights how the people who know the least are often the most obnoxious about trying to force their own beliefs down your throat. In the city I used to live in I had my favorite radio station. It provided the best local news, in my opinion. Unfortunately, it had a popular DJ who was a football fanatic. Not just your run of the mill football fanatic but one who couldn’t have a single show without bringing football into it. His family, true to his love (and I know many people who love football who are not this way and who I don’t complain about,) his family had Nebraska Football watch parties. The thing was this man was so obnoxious about it his friends and family eventually made him watch the game in a separate room from those in the watch party because his anger and rants spoiled everyone else’s enjoyment of the game. He would actually spit as he raged. Similarly, he lamented on air that his son hated football and everything about it. He tried and tried to get his son interested in his love of the game but for some “unexplainable” reason his son was turned off by it and wanted nothing to do with it. As a boy who loved movies (especially Star Trek and Science Fiction,) back in the days when people had only one television, in Nebraska on football game days the TV was dominated by football and I came to hate the dreaded words after overtime “we now return to our regularly scheduled program already in progress.” More than once all I saw where the last scene and the credits of a movie I had looked forward to all week.

Since I was so much younger than my siblings and didn’t follow football – but had read the Hobbit by first grade – my sister took me to the library or to the book store and bought me a new book every game day. That worked for me and I looked forward to game days because I got a new book and spent time with my sister discussing history, Star Trek, vampires, or other things that interested me more. The difference was that my folks never tried to ram their love of football down my throat. I loved rainy days when mom didn’t go to the game because I got to spend time with my dad at the game. I DID like the energy of actually being at a game and I imagine that some of that same energy is garnered from watch parties and is why people like them.

So what does this have to do with Christmas? Well, the announcer had a series where people could call in and complain about their pet peeves. He called it “What Chaps My Hide.” Apparently, a great deal “chapped his hide.” He disliked science fiction movies, monsters, he really hated Halloween, and holiday decoration and he hated Christmas. He didn’t think he did but he thought Christmas decorations should all come down on December 26^th and it bugged the hell out of him when they were still up. He even highlighted a company that you could hire to take down your neighbor’s Christmas decorations if they were still up after Christmas Day. (I would press charges if they tried that with me but once again this man thought everyone was entitled to live according to his preferences.)

He claimed to be a Christian. At least in name. But he had no clue that the first day of the 12 days of Christmas was December 25^th or the 26th as some people count Christmas Day as Christmas Day and the 12 Days of the Christmas season as starting the day after. Surely you have heard the song the 12 Days of Christmas? Didn’t you ever wonder what the heck they were?

The four weeks leading up to Christmas are called Advent, highlighted by the four Sundays before Christmas. During those weeks many people get an advent calendar – a good one will lead you through meditations of what it is like to be without Jesus and the miracle of the incarnation of the avatar of God manifesting in physical form on Earth. Now, I am not using avatar as a symbol you use for your games nor in the sense of “the Avatar” cartoon. But in other religions an avatar is the personification of God (or gods) on Earth. That is the Christ. The messiah was the living incarnation of God upon Earth to free us from the cycle of death and destruction that we started when we disobeyed and got kicked out of paradise. Christians don’t use the term Avatar but, in my mind, most people are no longer Christian and the “don’t speak Christian” which is one reason why modern Christians are so out of touch with people in society and why I hear so many people say “christians believe …” and then launch into a diatribe about things I have never heard any denomination espouse in my entire life – and I have studied religions. No one seems to know, even churches, what Christians believe anymore.

Even my churches I pastored always wondered why we didn’t sing Christmas songs leading up to Christmas. “Because it’s not Christmas yet.” I would answer and I would explain that Christmas starts on Christmas morning. Advent, the four weeks before Christmas are for Advent songs. You are to prepare your hearts for the arrival of Christ and use advent to make room in your busy lives for Christ to rest in your heart as part of you.

There are many fine advent hymns. One of my favs is “O Come O Come Emmanuel” – and ransom captive Israel – and us. Save us from this vale of sin and death! That is the point of the song, that God hears us in our suffering and sent help. That is the point of all the advent songs that God heard us and He still hears us. Other great Advent hymns are “Come Thou Long Expected Jesus” (maybe that’s my fav,) “Joy to the World,” “Mary’s Song,” “Silent Night,” “O Holy Night,” “O Come All Ye Faithful,” “Lo, How a Rose ‘ere Blooming” (on of my mom’s favs – I remember singing it in German,) “The First Noel,” “Angels We Have Heard On High,” “Away in a Manger”, “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear,” “We Three Kings,” “Angels We Have Heard On High” (I love the chorus), and my other fav (a civil war song written on the day he heard his son had been severely wounded and which I made sure we sang every year in my families Christmas Carol Coffee whenever American soldiers were in harms way…which has been every hear of my 23 year old son’s life. Many of those years it was his brothers in harms way. The Christmas Carol Coffee is a tradition my mom started before I was born and( which I continued until my liver failed and had to stop,) –that song was “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.”The Song We Sang every year American Soldiers Were In Harms Way – Written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow after he heard his son, a Union Soldier, had been severely wounded in the battle of Mine Run in 1863 during the American Civil War.

Even through the 1800s Christians knew that Christmas started on Christmas morning and was celebrated for 12 days after (I guess in the 1800s when people actually DID live a hard life with death by all sorts of diseases, childbirth, bullets, and accidents occurred at such a high rate sometimes populations didn’t have enough kids to replace the losses that then you grabbed at reasons to party for 12 days.) It was the norm in the South to even give their slaves off for the 12 days of Christmas! You wouldn’t believe the number of southern women who complained in their diaries in the 1800s about how hard it was to entertain visitors on New Years Day without the help of their “domestics” because they had been given time off to spend with their families over Christmas…all twelve days of it. Today the wage slaves are lucky if they can even get Christmas Day off! My youngest son has to work this Christmas. I am not so young that I don’t remember the days when EVERYTHING except police, fire, and hospitals were closed on Sundays and Christmas and Easter as it was expected that families would actually spend that day together “being a family.” Too many families today wouldn’t even know how to talk to each other if we went back to that – although today most families wouldn’t talk unless you shut down the cell towers too.

Hispanics still celebrate 3 Kings Day on 12^th Night, the 12^th Day of Christmas which is either the 5^th or 6^th of January depending on if counting starts on Christmas Day or if it counts Christmas Day as Christmas Day and the 1^st Day of Christmas as the 26^th of December. But, either way, 12^th Night has been celebrate by Christians for almost 2000 years but most American “Christians” have never heard of it and never celebrated it because their Christmas is over on Christmas Day. The idea of making a special place in their hearts and their families for 12 days of Christmas is foreign to them…they have to get back to work and shove aside all that “faith crap.” After all, you don’t expect a person’s faith to actually change how you live do you?

And that is the problem that really “chaps my hide.” People who claim a faith that makes no difference in their lives. Or who claim faith but nothing in how they live would prove to you that they have it. Jesus would have said that was impossible. But in Aramaic belief and action are included in the same word. Jesus could not have envisioned someone “believing” in something and not doing something about it. “Let those who have ears to hear, let them hear.” The Bible often says.

I guess that is really why SabersEdge is here. We don’t expect to change everyone’s mind. But let those who have ears to hear let them hear. Let those who have eyes to see, let them see. And we will let those who remain deaf and blind – like that radio announcer, continue on their own way. As for you, I hope you see and hear something new that you didn’t know that adds richness and depth to your life and understanding.

For those interested in history here is We Three Kings in Old English…not Middle English which is what most people think of as Old English but actual Old English as spoken in England before the Norman French conquered England and screwed up our language with weird spellings.