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Why We All Need Christmas Trees and Easter Eggs


Many years ago I had some friends at university who were against Christmas. 'It's not in the Bible,' they argued. Well, possibly. The festival at least is not actually in the Bible. So how did we come to celebrate Christmas and Easter in the ways we do now?

Part of the answer is that we continued some practices from our previous, pagan religion. Churches were built next to sacred trees. The winter festival was redeemed and became Christmas, along with the Christmas trees, which might have come later, but are definitely not in the Bible. Similarly the spring festival was redeemed and became Easter, though this actually coincides with the Jewish Passover festival when a lamb was sacrificed in remembrance of the redemption of the people Israel from Egypt, (John 19.14 cf. Exo 12ff).

What my friends were against is the mixing of our previous paganism and our current Christianity into one, syncretistic modern day religion, with all of its feasts and fasts.

I would argue that we all need such festivals:

  • The Israelites had many feasts and fasts in their calendar
  • It helps provide a rhythm in our communities and family lives
  • When first initiated, it provided continuity with past rhythms
In fact, the same process of adoption and adaptation of previous practices, what some missiologists call 'redeeming' a previous practice, is still occurring today throughout the world. In Africa and Asia the big issue is how to continue ancestor worship practices after conversion to Christianity without simply mixing previous traditional religion with today's Christianity. Korea is the big success story, partly due to the fact that they managed to carry out this transition reasonably successfully, despite some initial losses: 

"How has Korean Christianity coped with ancestor worship? The Korean Protestant Church resisted being syncretised with shamanistic ancestor worship. As a result many Christians were martyred. In an attempt to accommodate the social and traditional elements required by Korean culture, the Korean Christian Church instituted the memorial service as an alternative. This meant that the Korean Protestant Church was able to meet the moral and social functions previously fulfilled by ancestor worship while eliminating the religious elements of ancestor worship without compromising the principles of the Gospel. In other words, ancestor worship in the Korean Church was transformed into the Koreanised memorial service which served the indigenous culture."*

This, in contrast to Africa, where, partly due to a lack of contextualisation by Mission workers, Christianity has simply become a more formal layer on top of Christianity: 

"Unfortunately, many Western missionaries who came to Africa were unaware of the African worldview. Influenced by the philosophies of the age of Enlightenment, these missionaries readily dismissed the spirit world as being nothing more than a figment of the imagination. This left most African converts with no biblical teaching in relation to the spirit world, thereby leaving a huge gap in the faith of the African Christian. [...] This helps explain why in many cases African converts return to traditional beliefs as occasion arises with remarkable ease Conversion to Christianity does not answer their deep religious questions. Christianity is just a overlay on their original religious beliefs."**

The fact that, after a struggle, the Korean church managed to replaced Ancestor Worship with a memorial service, helped the community move onto a balanced Christian view of the world, where ancestors are shown proper respect, but Christ is the only one worshipped. Perhaps Christmas trees and Easter eggs did the same for us, some 1800 years ago? 

Image by Pexels from Pixabay

* Bae, Choon Sup, ‘Ancestor Worship and the Challenges It Poses to the Christian Mission and Ministry’ (University of Praetoria, 2007), p. 74.
** Salala, Charles, ‘The World of Spirits: Basukuma Traditional Religion and Biblical Christianity’, in Issues in African Theology, ed. by Samuel Ngewa, Mark Shaw, and Tite Tienou (Nairobi, Kenya: East African Educational Publishers, 1998), p. 137.


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