Christmas - religion, tradition or commercial property for big corporations?

There comes a moment in a persons life that, after you pass certain cultural and intellectual stages, that you thrive to understand certain things. Living in a commercialized society you reach a certain point of saturation and end up dismissing most of the things that are fed to you by society.
So as far as the definition of tradition in concerned tradition is “the transmission of customs or beliefs from generation to generation, or the fact of being passed on in this way ‘’. Yes a system of repetition that in one way or another has ended up in our lifestyle.
So what is Christmas? Is it a tradition because we have been celebrating it since the day we were born? How about the people that do not celebrate Christmas? Yes you might say every religion or culture has a different way of celebrating a tradition. I agree but in this particular editorial I am focusing solely on the christian community. Why u might ask? Well the last couple of days were somewhat emotionally hectic to me and today I decided to try to gather my thoughts and share some of my research and beliefs regarding this issue.
So if you have time come with me on this journey of questions and mental exercise. It might do you good after a month of commercialized mental exhaustion that has been following you around since … well since Thanksgiving..that is the official date if I am not mistaken for the launch of the corporate brain washing mechanism.

I come from a orthodox family and we celebrate a lot of orthodox holidays, Christmas being one of major importance. Since I was little, contrary to western traditions, I knew that Santa Claus was never a real magical guy and if he were to come down the chimney in those cold Romanian winters he would burn his fat behind since our main source of heating back then was a wood burning based type of stove. So from a young age I established that there was no way that Santa existed and one day as my mother rushed to go buy my Christmas present that year ( I believe it was a doll of some sort) I told her that she should let me come with her to the store since I know She is in fact buying the doll and not going to meet Santa. I was a very intuitive child and I pride myself with that intuition to this day. I am obviously off track with my story and this will probably become a very in depth article. Getting back to it, since we were not doing the whole Santa thing, we had our own Christmas traditions. The day before Christmas my dad and I would go to the tree market to pick up a fir tree. As we lived in a very high ceiling house it had to be big, alive and kicking! We would come back, with our blue Dacia car barely holding up the weight of the tree and then my father would pick up his axe and begin to mount the tree in its support. Only after this and only on Christmas Eve(!) we would begin to decorate the tree with candy and lights and whatnot! My mom would buy us oranges and the smell of oranges combined with the smell of freshly cut pin tree still stays with me to this day and for some reason I still buy oranges at Christmas! That was our tradition, our special moment of Christmas! I wouldn’t expect gifts or anything else. That special family moment was more than anything I could ask for. I still miss that to this day!

Being the grown up that I am today, moving across the world and many Christmases later I have decided to research this moment so celebrated in our society.
The first Christmas celebrated on the 25th in December was during the time of the first Christian Roman Emperor Constantine and a couple a years after that Pope Julius officially declared it the birth of Jesus and since then all christianity celebrates it this particular day. The fir tree on the other hand, was a German invention (like most good inventions, they tend to be made in Germany or with German parts hehe) somewhere in the 17th century as it first appeared in Strasbourg, Alsace . In the 1820s German immigrants first decorated a tree in Pennsylvania and in 1848 when German Prince Albert married Queen Victoria he brought with him the Christmas tree.

After that, it all became history or shall we better describe it as Tradition? Today nine in ten Americans say they celebrate Christmas .

That being said let’s look at it from another point of view and that point has made many victims along its past.. RELIGION!

What is religion and why has it claimed and continues to claim so many souls?Well the official explanation is that it is “the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods”. OK..sounds like a reasonable explanation..but what does that have to do with Christmas?Yes before you jump at me I know that Christmas is a christian religious holiday and that it celebrates the birth of Jesus. But why don’t all christian religions celebrate Christmas? Let’s take Jehovah Witness for example they to believe in God as our creator and in Jesus as our savior but No Christmas! According to them they do not celebrate because they believe that these festivals are based on (or massively contaminated by) pagan customs and religions. They point out that Jesus did not ask his followers to mark his birthday. Well tomato, tomato..not to offend anybody but they are missing out..at least on some great moments with family..But why do we celebrate and is the religious connection more profound then the traditions? Or has it become so commercial that we do not even consider any of those two? Is our system of values so degraded that we have become some sort of mice in this big money corporate ferris wheel? There is a time to stop and think of who we are and what is fake in our lifestyle. And it is not easy to do so, since most of our existence is flooded with information and we are left confused as to what we should do or think.
I say this as long as you have a brain and still have the right to use it however you please, you should try and put it to work.
Regardless of your origin, ethnicity, beliefs in religion or traditions there is one thing that can make us ONE. And that is love for one another! With true love for a certain human being Respect will always follow and with that comes acceptance!
Your beliefs should not have to alter someones joy in a certain thing whether it is Santa or Christmas or Hanukkah or none of the above. There is no pointing fingers at love, respect and acceptance.
That is what makes us human and it should count more than any aspect of society whether it is commercial or not. Life is too short and too damn hard for us to belittle the ones that participate or not in the business of traditions.

Keep in touch,
@lidac