What Is The Meaning of Christmas? Here Are Some Possibilities.

For the record, everyone here is quite familiar with the actual meaning of Christmas. Linus put it pretty well like fifty years ago. But concentrating only on that would make this a Post About Religion, and those are always a nightmare. People in the comments will start religioning at each other, or deligioning, and instigators will point out that Jesus was probably born like four years before Jesus, and probably not in the winter, and by the way Linus also believes in a magical anthropomorphic pumpkin, and nobody will make it out of the comments section alive. So let's leave it at this: In some month, of some year, somewhere, someone was born, and he was pretty important, and this is the meaning of Christmas. Everyone agrees!

However, Christmas has outgrown that meaning (in a good way). It's significant to people everywhere, of all faiths, for lots of reasons. Here are some of them.

1.) Gift-giving
Normally when you spend a day singing and hugging people, then walk home with a wheelbarrow of cool junk you didn't pay for, it's because you have spent a day engaged in musical shoplifting. Not on Christmas, though; for one remarkable day, people drop everything to give things to everyone else, even though it's the dead of winter, the heating bill's overdue, and the driveway is full of penguins.

This behavior is as insane as it is universal. Humans have been giving away all their stuff since forever, and even a chimpanzee will give you a present if you will eat the bugs that are on the chimpanzee, which you would probably not consider an awesome trade, but you get the point. Of course, gift giving is about more than just monkeys and bankruptcy; it's about being a good enough friend to know exactly what someone wants. Six months ago, your buddy was laughing at pictures of fat dogs on the internet, and when you roll up on Christmas with a morbidly obese puppy stuffed in a box, the look on his face will be priceless.

2.) Family
Seasons change, and friends come and go, but you and some other people have the same weird nose, and that lasts forever. Just like your goofy last name and probable baldness, that weird nose is part of a bond that can never be broken. And even if your family is a bunch of intolerable goons the rest of the year, taking the last Pop-Tart and putting the empty box back in the cupboard and then holding up the bathroom because they're in there eating your Pop-Tart, this time of year is full of the endearing experiences that make you want to punch them slightly less.

You'll all construct a ridiculous web of lies to make someone's nephew re-believe in Christmas after he saw a Santa leaving the mall on a bus. You'll gather around a sad, floppy plastic tree and argue about which ornaments are nice and which are stupid, finally concluding that all ornaments are stupid and so is everything else. Someone will drink the last of the eggnog and put the empty carton back in the fridge, and you'll threaten to kill him with spiders, but jokingly this time. In other words, you will have a frustrating, embarrassing, and very normal Christmas, because these people really aren't so terrible, and besides, you're kind of stuck with them.

3.) The "Spirit of Christmas"
This entry isn't about spirits of Christmas in the Dickensian sense, although if there are any ghosts yelling at you, you should probably do what they say. But we're talking about the sense that this holiday is a shared experience that beings everyone a little bit closer.

It's easy to get burnt out on Christmas, given that stores start piping in torturous Christmas music somewhere around July, and even products that have nothing whatsoever to do with Christmas trot out some kind of holiday commercial imploring you to buy their junk. ("Oh no, Santa got eaten by a shark! If only he had used ACME Brand shark repellant.") But in a way, all this senseless stupidity is part of the charm; mustard companies have to slap a Rudolph on their mustard and call it Christmas Mustard, and CSI has to dedicate an episode to a Santa-themed arsonist, because this is one of those rare cultural things that everyone experiences. For a few weeks, there's a sense that we all have something in common, and we're all in this together.

Even if it's not that fun and we're freezing.

What do you think is the meaning of Christmas?

Related post: The True Meaning of Christmas: Jazz Dance!