After knowing this, how could any true follower of CHRIST approve of this practice?

How Did Christmas Come to Be Celebrated on December 25?

A. Roman pagans first introduced the holiday of Saturnalia, a week long period of lawlessness celebrated between December 17-25. During this period, Roman courts were closed, and Roman law dictated that no one could be punished for damaging property or injuring people during the weeklong celebration. The festival began when Roman authorities chose “an enemy of the Roman people” to represent the “Lord of Misrule.” Each Roman community selected a victim whom they forced to indulge in food and other physical pleasures throughout the week. At the festival’s conclusion, December 25th, Roman authorities believed they were destroying the forces of darkness by brutally murdering this innocent man or woman.

B. The ancient Greek writer poet and historian Lucian (in his dialogue entitled Saturnalia) describes the festival’s observance in his time. In addition to human sacrifice, he mentions these customs: widespread intoxication; going from house to house while singing naked; rape and other sexual license; and consuming human-shaped biscuits (still produced in some English and most German bakeries during the Christmas season).

C. In the 4th century CE, Christianity imported the Saturnalia festival hoping to take the pagan masses in with it. Christian leaders succeeded in converting to Christianity large numbers of pagans by promising them that they could continue to celebrate the Saturnalia as Christians.[1]

D. The problem was that there was nothing intrinsically Christian about Saturnalia. To remedy this, these Christian leaders named Saturnalia’s concluding day, December 25th, to be Jesus’ birthday.

E. Christians had little success, however, refining the practices of Saturnalia. As Stephen Nissenbaum, professor history at the University of Massachussetts, Amherst, writes, “In return for ensuring massive observance of the anniversary of the Savior’s birth by assigning it to this resonant date, the Church for its part tacitly agreed to allow the holiday to be celebrated more or less the way it had always been.” The earliest Christmas holidays were celebrated by drinking, sexual indulgence, singing naked in the streets (a precursor of modern caroling), etc.

F. The Reverend Increase Mather of Boston observed in 1687 that “the early Christians who first observed the Nativity on December 25 did not do so thinking that Christ was born in that Month, but because the Heathens’ Saturnalia was at that time kept in Rome, and they were willing to have those Pagan Holidays metamorphosed into Christian ones.”[2] Because of its known pagan origin, Christmas was banned by the Puritans and its observance was illegal in Massachusetts between 1659 and 1681.[3] However, Christmas was and still is celebrated by most Christians.

G. Some of the most depraved customs of the Saturnalia carnival were intentionally revived by the Catholic Church in 1466 when Pope Paul II, for the amusement of his Roman citizens, forced Jews to race naked through the streets of the city. An eyewitness account reports, “Before they were to run, the Jews were richly fed, so as to make the race more difficult for them and at the same time more amusing for spectators. They ran… amid Rome’s taunting shrieks and peals of laughter, while the Holy Father stood upon a richly ornamented balcony and laughed heartily.”[4]

H. As part of the Saturnalia carnival throughout the 18th and 19th centuries CE, rabbis of the ghetto in Rome were forced to wear clownish outfits and march through the city streets to the jeers of the crowd, pelted by a variety of missiles. When the Jewish community of Rome sent a petition in1836 to Pope Gregory XVI begging him to stop the annual Saturnalia abuse of the Jewish community, he responded, “It is not opportune to make any innovation.”[5] On December 25, 1881, Christian leaders whipped the Polish masses into Antisemitic frenzies that led to riots across the country. In Warsaw 12 Jews were brutally murdered, huge numbers maimed, and many Jewish women were raped. Two million rubles worth of property was destroyed.




The Origins of Christmas Customs

A. The Origin of Christmas Tree Just as early Christians recruited Roman pagans by associating Christmas with the Saturnalia, so too worshippers of the Asheira cult and its offshoots were recruited by the Church sanctioning “Christmas Trees”.[6] Pagans had long worshipped trees in the forest, or brought them into their homes and decorated them, and this observance was adopted and painted with a Christian veneer by the Church.

B. The Origin of Mistletoe Norse mythology recounts how the god Balder was killed using a mistletoe arrow by his rival god Hoder while fighting for the female Nanna. Druid rituals use mistletoe to poison their human sacrificial victim.[7] The Christian custom of “kissing under the mistletoe” is a later synthesis of the sexual license of Saturnalia with the Druidic sacrificial cult.[8]

C. The Origin of Christmas Presents In pre-Christian Rome, the emperors compelled their most despised citizens to bring offerings and gifts during the Saturnalia (in December) and Kalends (in January). Later, this ritual expanded to include gift-giving among the general populace. The Catholic Church gave this custom a Christian flavor by re-rooting it in the supposed gift-giving of Saint Nicholas (see below).[9]

D. The Origin of Santa Claus

a. Nicholas was born in Parara, Turkey in 270 CE and later became Bishop of Myra. He died in 345 CE on December 6th. He was only named a saint in the 19th century.

b. Nicholas was among the most senior bishops who convened the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE and created the New Testament. The text they produced portrayed Jews as “the children of the devil”[10] who sentenced Jesus to death.

c. In 1087, a group of sailors who idolized Nicholas moved his bones from Turkey to a sanctuary in Bari, Italy. There Nicholas supplanted a female boon-giving deity called The Grandmother, or Pasqua Epiphania, who used to fill the children's stockings with her gifts. The Grandmother was ousted from her shrine at Bari, which became the center of the Nicholas cult. Members of this group gave each other gifts during a pageant they conducted annually on the anniversary of Nicholas’ death, December 6.

d. The Nicholas cult spread north until it was adopted by German and Celtic pagans. These groups worshipped a pantheon led by Woden –their chief god and the father of Thor, Balder, and Tiw. Woden had a long, white beard and rode a horse through the heavens one evening each Autumn. When Nicholas merged with Woden, he shed his Mediterranean appearance, grew a beard, mounted a flying horse, rescheduled his flight for December, and donned heavy winter clothing.

e. In a bid for pagan adherents in Northern Europe, the Catholic Church adopted the Nicholas cult and taught that he did (and they should) distribute gifts on December 25th instead of December 6th.

f. In 1809, the novelist Washington Irving (most famous his The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winklem) wrote a satire of Dutch culture entitled Knickerbocker History. The satire refers several times to the white bearded, flying-horse riding Saint Nicholas using his Dutch name, Santa Claus.

g. Dr. Clement Moore, a professor at Union Seminary, read Knickerbocker History, and in 1822 he published a poem based on the character Santa Claus: “Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, in the hope that Saint Nicholas soon would be there…” Moore innovated by portraying a Santa with eight reindeer who descended through chimneys.

h. The Bavarian illustrator Thomas Nast almost completed the modern picture of Santa Claus. From 1862 through 1886, based on Moore’s poem, Nast drew more than 2,200 cartoon images of Santa for Harper’s Weekly. Before Nast, Saint Nicholas had been pictured as everything from a stern looking bishop to a gnome-like figure in a frock. Nast also gave Santa a home at the North Pole, his workshop filled with elves, and his list of the good and bad children of the world. All Santa was missing was his red outfit.

i. In 1931, the Coca Cola Corporation contracted the Swedish commercial artist Haddon Sundblom to create a coke-drinking Santa. Sundblom modeled his Santa on his friend Lou Prentice, chosen for his cheerful, chubby face. The corporation insisted that Santa’s fur-trimmed suit be bright, Coca Cola red. And Santa was born – a blend of Christian crusader, pagan god, and commercial idol.


The Christmas Challenge

· Christmas has always been a holiday celebrated carelessly. For millennia, pagans, Christians, and even Jews have been swept away in the season’s festivities, and very few people ever pause to consider the celebration’s intrinsic meaning, history, or origins.

· Christmas celebrates the birth of the Christian god who came to rescue mankind from the “curse of the Torah.” It is a 24-hour declaration that Judaism is no longer valid.

· Christmas is a lie. There is no Christian church with a tradition that Jesus was really born on December 25th. (DUH! Anyone who studies to show themselves approved - a workman that NEEDETH NOT BE ASHAMED would know He was born on the Feast of Tabernacles. If you say otherwise, you do ERR - not knowing the Scriptures!)

· December 25 is a day on which Jews have been shamed, tortured, and murdered.
· Many of the most popular Christmas customs – including Christmas trees, mistletoe, Christmas presents, and Santa Claus – are modern incarnations of the most depraved pagan rituals ever practiced on earth.



Many who are excitedly preparing for their Christmas celebrations would prefer not knowing about the holiday’s real significance. If they do know the history, they often object that their celebration has nothing to do with the holiday’s monstrous history and meaning. “We are just having fun.”

Imagine that between 1933-45, the Nazi regime celebrated Adolf Hitler’s birthday – April 20 – as a holiday. Imagine that they named the day, “Hitlerday,” and observed the day with feasting, drunkenness, gift-giving, and various pagan practices. Imagine that on that day, Jews were historically subject to perverse tortures and abuse, and that this continued for centuries.

Now, imagine that your great-great-great-grandchildren were about to celebrate Hitlerday. April 20th arrived. They had long forgotten about Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen. They had never heard of gas chambers or death marches. They had purchased champagne and caviar, and were about to begin the party, when someone reminded them of the day’s real history and their ancestors’ agony. Imagine that they initially objected, “We aren’t celebrating the Holocaust; we’re just having a little Hitlerday party.” If you could travel forward in time and meet them; if you could say a few words to them, what would you advise them to do on Hitlerday?

On December 25, 1941, Julius Streicher, one of the most vicious of Hitler’s assistants, celebrated Christmas by penning the following editorial in his rabidly Antisemitic newspaper, Der Stuermer:

If one really wants to put an end to the continued prospering of this curse from heaven that is the Jewish blood, there is only one way to do it: to eradicate this people, this Satan’s son, root and branch.

It was an appropriate thought for the day. This Christmas, how will we celebrate?

AUTHOR: LAWRENCE KELEMEN

SOURCES

[1] The first mention of a Nativity feast appears in the Philocalian calendar, a Roman document from 354 CE, which lists December 25th as the day of Jesus’ birth.

[2] Increase Mather, A Testimony against Several Prophane and Superstitious Customs, Now Practiced by Some in New England (London, 1687), p. 35. See also Stephen Nissenbaum, The Battle for Christmas: A Cultural History of America’s Most Cherished Holiday, New York: Vintage Books, 1997, p. 4.

[3] Nissenbaum, p. 3.

[4] David I. Kertzer, The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican’s Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001, p. 74.

[5] Kertzer, p. 33, 74-5.

[6] Clement Miles, Christmas Customs and Traditions: Their History and Significance, New York: Dover Publications, 1976, pp. 178, 263-271.

[7] Miles, p. 273.

[8] Miles, p. 274-5.

[9] Miles, pp. 276-279.

[10] John 8:44

the seventh month on the tenth day

The evening of Sept 29 on the Gregorian calendar began the 10th day of the seventh month of the agriculturally and astronomically corrected calendar -- which I like to refer to as YHWH's calendar.

Lev 16:29-34 RNKJV_W And this shall be a statute for ever unto you: that in the seventh month, on the tenth day of the month, ye shall afflict your souls, and do no work at all, whether it be one of your own country, or a stranger that sojourneth among you: (30) For on that day shall the priest make an atonement for you, to cleanse you, that ye may be clean from all your sins before YHWH. (31) It shall be a sabbath of rest unto you, and ye shall afflict your souls, by a statute for ever. (32) And the priest, whom he shall anoint, and whom he shall consecrate to minister in the priests office in his fathers stead, shall make the atonement, and shall put on the linen clothes, even the holy garments: (33) And he shall make an atonement for the holy sanctuary, and he shall make an atonement for the tabernacle of the congregation, and for the altar, and he shall make an atonement for the priests, and for all the people of the congregation. (34) And this shall be an everlasting statute unto you, to make an atonement for the children of Israel for all their sins once a year. And he did as YHWH commanded Moses.

For years, the children of Israel rehearsed this practice. To this day, they still do. The only part they do not rehearse anymore is verses 32-34. I would like to think that Yeshua HaMoshiach (Jesus the Messiah) will one day return and fulfill this part of this day in the spiritual -- just as he came and fulfilled the spring feasts of the LORD: Feast of Unleavened Bread, Passover, Feast of Shavuot (Weeks), & the 50th day (later known as Pentecost in the book of Acts). It is my only hope because I read in the instructions of YHWH to Moses that this is to be "an everlasting statute... to make an atonement for the children of Israel for all their sins once a year." I am of the understanding that Yeshua was the final Passover lamb, whose blood speaks of better things that the blood of bulls and goats. I understand that He is known in the heavens as "the Lamb of God".

But what are verses 32-34 really saying here?
What I understand it to be saying is that the anointed priest who is full of power, will minister in the office of priest in lieu of his father. He will make atonement. I looked up that word "atonement" in the Brown-Driver-Briggs' Hebrew Definitions. I found the definition interesting as a Scripture popped into my rememberance while reading it. First I'll share the definition, then the Scripture that the Holy Spirit reminded me of.

to cover, purge, make an atonement, make reconciliation, cover over with pitch

• to cover over, pacify, propitiate
• atone for sin and persons by legal rites
• to be covered

Now the Scripture I was reminded of:

Eze 16:10 RNKJV_W I clothed thee also with broidered work, and shod thee with badgers skin, and I girded thee about with fine linen, and I covered thee with silk.

The badgers' skin was used to cover the tabernacle as well.

Exo 26:14 RNKJV_W And thou shalt make a covering for the tent of rams skins dyed red, and a covering above of badgers skins.

We see the tent is covered in badgers' skins and we see YHWH telling the people of Israel that he covered them with badgers' skin through the prophet Ezekiel. He already covered the people. He already covered the tabernacle. Yet that is the job of the priest: to make an atonement for (cover) the holy sanctuary, for the tabernacle of the congregation, for the altar, for the priests, and for all the people of the congregation.

Another area of Torah gives us further instruction on how to observe this day:

Lev 23:27-32 RNKJV_W Also on the tenth day of this seventh month there shall be a day of atonement: it shall be an holy convocation unto you; and ye shall afflict your souls, and offer an offering made by fire unto YHWH. (28) And ye shall do no work in that same day: for it is a day of atonement, to make an atonement for you before YHWH your Elohim. (29) For whatsoever soul it be that shall not be afflicted in that same day, he shall be cut off from among his people. (30) And whatsoever soul it be that doeth any work in that same day, the same soul will I destroy from among his people. (31) Ye shall do no manner of work: it shall be a statute for ever throughout your generations in all your dwellings. (32) It shall be unto you a sabbath of rest, and ye shall afflict your souls: in the ninth day of the month at even, from even unto even, shall ye celebrate your sabbath.

This tenth day of the seventh month is known today as the Day of Atonement, or Yom Kippur in the Hebrew language. Yom Kippur is a day the children of Israel are to "afflict [their] souls". What does this mean? It means that they are to humble themselves, to oppress themselves, to bow themselves down, to become depressed and downcast. What is the purpose of doing this? Since this was the ONE day of the entire year that the priest made an atonement for all the people of the congregation, it was important that the people did not make this into a formal ritual, but rather that they were made aware of the importance of this day and what it meant in relation to their salvation.

This was the only day that the people were commanded to publicly fast.

It was also a high sabbath day. The children of Israel were not to work on this day nor allow the stranger who sojourned with them to work. Albert Barnes' Notes on the Bible has this to say about being "cut off" from Genesis 17:14:

To be “cut off from his people” is to be excluded from any part in the covenant, and treated simply as a Gentile or alien, some of whom seem to have dwelt among the Israelites. It was sometimes accompanied with the sentence of death Exo_31:14; and this shows that it did not of itself imply such a doom.

Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Bible has something similar to say:

The uncircumcised - shall be cut off from his people - By being cut off some have imagined that a sudden temporal death was implied; but the simple meaning seems to be that such should have no right to nor share in the blessings of the covenant, which we have already seen were both of a temporal and spiritual kind; and if so, then eternal death was implied, for it was impossible for a person who had not received the spiritual purification to enter into eternal glory. The spirit of this law extends to all ages, dispensations, and people; he whose heart is not purified from sin cannot enter into the kingdom of God. Reader, on what is thy hope of heaven founded?

I looked up the word "convocation" in the Brown-Driver-Briggs' Hebrew Definitions and this is what it had to say:

convocation, convoking, reading, a calling together

• sacred assembly

The Strong's says:

miqrâ'

mik-raw'

From H7121; something called out, that is, a public meeting (the act, the persons, or the palce); also a rehearsal: - assembly, calling, convocation, reading.

"Also a rehearsal." These are important words.

YHWH has instructed the children of Israel, via Moses, to observe laws, statues, days, and feasts. The purpose of these things were not made obvious to the children of Israel during the days of Moses. These are rehearsals until the day that Messiah returns. Already, Messiah came one time and he fulfilled the springs feasts of the LORD to the very exact timing, the exact actions, every jot and every tittle was fulfilled.

He will come again -- the second time -- and these fall feasts we have been rehearsing will be fulfilled by him.

Rev 22:16-21 RNKJV_W I Yeshua have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the assemblies. I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star. (17) And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely. (18) For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, YHWH shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: (19) And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, YHWH shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book. (20) He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly. amen. Even so, come, Master Yeshua. (21) The grace of our Master Yeshua the Messiah be with you all. Amen.

10/01/2009 C.E. 07/11/6009 F.C.

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