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[Cryptographer]

What are your thoughts on this one about christmas?

I've seen some claim that it's full of misinfo and is mixing and matching cultures that have nothing to do with each other.

And I've some refuting claiming they aren't meant to be all as one from their origins as that's what the Christians put together after hundreds of years and it's giving the origin of each individual item, not saying they were always one.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FGsEMegWYAMK5w6?format=jpg&name=small

[jimwalton]

I've seen this kind of stuff plenty of times. There are quite a variety of opinions about from where the Christmas traditions derived or grew up. It's very difficult to know the truth about them because the "research" is so disparate.

Regardless, none of them are "Christmas," really, but rather just our culture's evolution of celebrating. "Christmas" itself—the birth of Jesus—has nothing to say about any of these and nothing to do with them. For instance, if we found out that shooting off fireworks as we do in America on July 4th is really derived from Chinese culture, does that mean our patriotic celebration is really Chinese? I don't think so. Derivation doesn't mean association.

The only thing it said about Jesus was that He was mostly likely not born in December, which is true. More plausible theories place His birth in spring or fall. (I happen to think it was in the fall, but that's neither here nor there.) But there are also disparate researched positions about why we celebrate in late December.

And I would also object to this person's idea that the concept of an angel was derived from Greek and Assyrian gods. That's bizarre. Genesis has angels back in 2000 BC, pre-dating Assyrian and Greek writings by many centuries.

I've read that the tradition of gifts came from Christians showing charity to the poor.

There are so many allegedly "true" stories about where all this stuff came from. It's pretty hard to know the truth.

A cartoon like this is just being unnecessarily deprecatory, presumably coming from someone with feelings of superiority and disdain.

As far as I'm concerned, it's fine if you get rid of the trees, wreaths, mistletoe, gifts, yule log, etc. While they are fun and pleasant traditions, they have nothing to do with the real Christmas.