Note: this topic is from 11/26/2011. Just adding to the catalog, not pinging.
Posted on 11/26/2011 11:05:31 AM PST by PieterCasparzen
The Pilgrims set foot on Plymouth Rock in November, 1620.
Can you imagine moving to a “New World”?
Can you imagine moving anywhere for that matter right before the rush of the Christmas season?
I can’t.
Maybe it’s just a woman thing, but I know what would have been on my mind had I been on the Mayflower. I would be thinking.......Here it is nearly the first of December, I have no home, and Christmas is just around the corner. I have shopping to do, the decorations need to be up (hope I remembered where I packed them), and then I have all the cooking to do. How am I going to fit 30 various parties, dinners, and gatherings into four weeks? When are the greeting cards going to get addressed? And.....how does one ship gifts back home from the “New World”?
By December, 1620 many of the Pilgrims were sick with scurvy and many more were suffering from wild coughing fits They hardly felt like celebrating, but the fact of the matter is any Pilgrims well enough spent their first December 25th in the New World by sending out scouting parties, building their first structures, and all of the other necessary tasks to build “New Plymouth”
The Pilgrims didn’t ignore Christmas because they had bigger fish to fry like securing shelter and gathering food. It was much more than that.
They didn’t celebrate Christmas….
…..at all.
Not a Christmas carol, a Christmas tree, or a Christmas meal. Nothing. Not even Santa.
The Grinch would have loved New Plymouth.
The Pilgrims were a very no nonsense, no frills type of people. If the Bible didn’t direct it, they didn’t do it. This means they didn’t buy into any additions made to Christianity especially church traditions.
Since Christmas was not mentioned in the Bible the Pilgrims ignored the holiday. They disapproved of the way their fellow Englishmen celebrated the day with parties, feasting, drinking, and bawdy behavior in some instances.
One year after the Pilgrims arrived in the New World on December 25, 1621, Governor William Bradford discovered a few recent arrivals to New Plymouth didn’t want to work on what the Pilgrims considered just another day. He made a notation in Of Plymouth Plantation:
“On the day called Christmas Day, the Governor called [the settlers] out to work as was usual. However, the most of this new company excused themselves and said it went against their consciences to work on that day. So the Governor told them that if they made it [a] matter of conscience he would spare them till they were better informed; so he led away the rest and left them.”
When the working party returned they found the men who had a conscience decided not only to refrain from working in recognition of the day they also decided to play games and shockingly they were having ……..FUN. The governor ordered them to stop making an exhibition in the streets for all to see. The men were told if they wanted to act like that to go to the privacy of their homes.
The Puritans who differed from the Pilgrims regarding the Anglican Church merely wanted to change certain practices of the church while the Pilgrims totally separated themselves from it, however they were on the same page regarding celebrating Christmas. They knew there was absolutely no Biblical proof regarding December as the birth month for Christ, and they knew history. They realized Christmas had roots in the pagan winter solstice festivals like the Roman Saturnalia. The argued the early Roman Catholic Church had taken a pagan holiday and merged it with Christian beliefs.
In the book The Battle for Christmas, Stephen Nissenbaum sums it up this way:
“The Puritan knew what subsequent generations would forget; that when the Church, more than a millennium earlier, had placed Christmas Day in late December, the decision was part of what amounted to a compromise, and a compromise for which the church paid a high price. Late-December festivities were deeply rooted in popular culture, both in observance of the winter solstice and in celebration of the one brief period period of leisure and plenty in the agricultural year. 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. From the beginning, the Church’s hold over Christmas was (and remains still) rather tenuous. There were always.people for whom Christmas was a time of pious devotion rather than carnival, but such people were always in the minority. It may not be going too far to say that Christmas has always been an extremely difficult day to Christianize. Little wonder that the Puritans were willing to save themselves the trouble.”
For sure – the Puritans didn’t trouble themselves. They just outlawed the holiday.
In fact, by Christmas, 1659 the Five-Shilling Anti-Christmas Law was enacted by the General Court of Massachusetts. The law stated:
Whosoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas, or the like, either by forebearing labor, feasting, or any other way upon such account as aforesaid, every such person so offending shall pay for each offense five shillings as a fine to the country.
Boston actually outlawed the celebration of Christmas from 1659 to 1681.
Even after the law was set aside in 1681, New Englanders were slow to accept Christmas. The customs of gift giving and parties and even decorations were considered to be pagan customs. My research indicates even as late as 1870 Boston schools held classes on Christmas Day.
It’s interesting to note that today we still have the Christmas tug-of-war. The church is still fighing the masses over the Christmas issue. Christians fuss and fume because it seems everyone celebrates the holiday even if they don’t actually believe in the reason for the season. Folks are in it for the parties, the drinking, the gifts, the decorations, the food, the general falderal whether they believe in the divinity of Christ or not.
Heck, even Christians enjoy the falderal. I do.
I’m just glad I can celebrate how I wish, believe what I want to, and I don’t have to pay fine while doing it.
Modern Christmas is a retail invention, just like Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day etc. Personally, I find all the hype and hysteria rather entertaining.
Not to be remiss but in many respects the people in the Plymouth colony had more freedom than those back in England.
Women for instance, had standing in court, could own property, inherited at least a third of their husbands estate even if he tries to write them out of the will and operate businesses. At the time, I don’t think women in England could do any of those (except maybe royalty or nobility). There were at least two drinking establishments owned by women in the records. (Yes, those things existed and even had female customers!)
I did some reading about it.
The Plymouth Colony and the Massachussetts colony were separate entities for a very long time, this writer should have pointed that out.
Do not learn the ways of the nations...
For the practices of the peoples are worthless;
they cut a tree out of the forest...
They adorn it with silver and gold;
they fasten it with hammer and nails
so it will not totter.
Deuteronomy 12:4
You must not worship the LORD your God in their [the pagan's] way.
When it was written, Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” was understood by all and sundry who read it as a critique not of miserliness, but of Puritanism, with its disdain for feasts, for ostentation of any sort, and its idea that God’s favor included (or perhaps was most shown by) material prosperity. The choice of Ebenezer as the name for the protagonist was meant to make the point more obvious: the Puritans much more so than other Christians in the 16th through 19th centuries were given to using Hebrew-derived names.
That's a reference to Asherah poles which were a sort of totem pole.
I had figured that Ebenezer ("rock of help" in Hebrew) had something to do with his character.
“Jeremiah 10:2-4
Do not learn the ways of the nations...”
Why do people not follow the Word Of God? Of course you are right. Jesus had a lot to say about the traditions of men overruling the Law Of God.
One day, every one of the pagans will know, I hope not too late.
Christmas is the pagan Saturnalia glossed over with Christian words.
The early Christian leader and writer Tertullian complained that too many fellow Christians had copied the Pagan practice of adorning their houses with lamps and with wreathes of laurel at Christmas time (Turtulian, "On Idolatry," XV. ).
Many Pagan cultures used to cut boughs of evergreen trees in December, move them into a home or temple, and decorate them ("The Christmas Tree as a Symbol of Pagan Baal Worship," The Ellen White Research Project, at: http://www.ellenwhite.org/). Modern-day Pagans still do this. This was in recognition of the winter solstice. Although most of the other plants died or lost their leaves, the evergreen trees remained green. The pagans often believed these trees had magical powers that made them able to withstand the cold.
In Europe, ancient Germanic peoples attached fruit and candles to evergreen tree branches in honor of their god Woden. Evergreen trees to them symbolized eternal life. The trees joined holly, mistletoe, the wassail bowl and the Yule log as symbols of the season. All predated Christianity ("Should Christians celebrate Christmas?," at: http://www.sovereigngrace.net/).
So true! Ping to post #9.
My understanding is that Jeremiah is writing of something more akin to totem poles.
Jeremiah is not talking of poles/pillars, he is speaking specifically of trees. The two are not the same.
2 Kings 23:14 And he broke in pieces the sacred pillars and cut down the wooden images(groves) and filled their places with the bones of men
One doesn't break something of wood into pieces, it is cut down. To make it stand back upright, nails must be used to keep it in place. However one does break into pieces that which is made of stone.
To this day the pagan religious pillars litter the landscapes of the creation of YHVH. These pillars are called “obelisks” and whether standing alone or attached to a religious building, these pillars/steeples represent the religious practices of pagan idol worship and are now made of both wood & stone thereby once again mixing things in order to create obfuscation in order to hide the truth. These pagan symbols are the gateway for the adversary in order for him to enter and plant his sexual promiscuity & sexual perversion amongst the ecclesia. And since, to this day, these pagan religious symbols are idolized by having them stand front and center, the gateway has an unobscured path right through the front door.
YHVH calls his people together by the blasting of the shofar(ram's horn), not by bells attached to a pagan religious sexual symbol that is derived from Nimrod's sexual organs.
Can you cite a commentary or scholar that supports your position? Matthew Henry certainly isn't describing something resembling a Christmas tree.
What does being alive during the 1st century have to do with Jeremiah 10?
Might I suggest you go to google books and read the volumes of catholic encyclopedias that have archived the historical evidence of Ashtoreth & pagan worship practices that they still teach in their seminaries to this day. That is where I get my knowledge from,
Since you already know where these sources are, it would be much more efficient if you could provide a link to the texts you believe to be authoritative.
“Can you cite a commentary or scholar that supports your position?”
It would be better to cite The Word Of God than the words of men.
To properly understand the Words of “The Word” who came to us in the flesh, it is vital that one understand 1st, 1st Century history, customs & idioms. The pagan worship practices were very much alive, just with different names according to the region of the middle east that they were practiced in due to the many languages.
Since you already know where these sources are, it would be much more efficient if you could provide a link to the texts
When I find resources at google I download them in pdf or epub so I can use them locally in teaching family & friends, I do not save the links thus if ones heart truly wants to seek the truth they will do as I did, do a word search and then collect and save the free resources so one can print out the actual pages necessary for learning & teaching. Also, I do not believe the catholic encyclopedias to be authoritative religiously because their religious doctrine states that Messiah appointed them the new & only keepers of his words & doctrine and thus they can change whatever suits them in order to keep religious power over the people while filling the pews and church bank account through false tithing, however their historical account of paganistic religious doctrine is extremely detailed & accurate.
That's not a problem. You can post enough info such as title, author, date, quote, etc that one of us can have a high confidence of doing a search and locating the same document and citation. You can also quickly create a file sharing account at a site such as Photobucket, Flikr, etc, or you can Freepmail the document.
if ones heart truly wants to seek the truth they will do as I did, do a word search and then collect and save the free resources so one can print out the actual pages necessary for learning & teaching.
Many of us are not growing younger. Since you have already found what you claim to be the truth, why not help myself and others following this thread by at least pointing us in the right direction?
I do not believe the catholic encyclopedias to be authoritative
Who ever said anything about Catholic encyclopedias? The discussion is about Jer 10 as it pertains to Christmas trees and particular whether bringing evergreens inside a home during winter to brighten a dreary interior is a pagan practice that should be avoided?
Very true and working with trifocals is no picnic so with that I wish you well in your journey. I found it amazing how youthful back to study can make a person. Thus I gave you the fuel that was given to me to get started, it's up to you whether you choose to use it or not.
Note: this topic is from 11/26/2011. Just adding to the catalog, not pinging.
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