Our Christmas traditions

We do things in life because they have become traditions or customs.

- Reverend Dr. Rocky Brown, 3rd

They become so much a part of our cultural existence that we do them without questioning or understanding why. We just do them because it has always been done. We need to be careful about that because we can do something wrong for so long that we begin to believe that it is right.

We have Christmas traditions and customs that we follow, and very few of us know why, what they mean, or where the ideas came from. We just do it.

Our story goes back at least 4,000 years ago. It begins in Mesopotamia, which is called the cradle of civilization. Here, Christmas really started as the festival that renewed the world for another year.

Here began the Twelve Days of Christmas, the festivals, the bright fires, the giving of gifts, the carnivals, merrymaking, and clowning, the mummers who sang and played from house to house, the church processions with their lights and songs.

All these and more began centuries before Christ was born, and they celebrated the arrival of a New Year. All people all over the world learned from Mesopotamia. Everything happening there in the course was time-limited by its neighbors - imitated, yet never copied exactly. Thus, it changed its face as it went.

The Northland people knew that winter followed summer, and that spring followed winter, and that winter was the time when all nature's green life died except in the evergreen. All the Northland cherished the Evergreen that did not die. Thus, long before the Christian era, Evergreens were used as an emblem of eternal life.

Holly symbolized joy and peace, and primitive people would hang it over their doors in the form of wreaths to entice spirits to bring good luck. Why a circle? Because a circle is the symbol of timelessness, and the green leaves are a symbol of life everlasting.