Is your nativity missing a dragon?

This Christmas, we might be closer than ever to the story’s origins. Terror. Surveillance. Poverty. Genocide. Perhaps it is time to add a dragon to tame creche scenes.

Julie Canlis

Julie connects Christian spirituality with ordinary life in Wenatchee, Washington State, where she teaches and writes.

The head of a giant paper dragon glows orange and red against a night sky.

Oliver Needham on Unsplash.

Advent is not Christmas. The wisdom of the church is this: humans need time to take stock of the grim reality of life, as the nights get even longer. We can’t skip forward with shopping bags and fairy lights to Christmas. These weeks of Advent prepare us. For the unexpected. For the necessity of grace.

Advent is the time the church reflects on its hierarchical structures, its imperialist tendencies, its obsession with power. And repents. It repents because it is about to celebrate that God’s greatest power move was to become powerless. Yes, the church forgets this annually. Sometimes centennially. But inbuilt within the church year is a season that forces it – and ourselves – to come face to face with our hypocrisy.

Advent begins in the darkest time of the year.

Advent is also an enforced time of waiting for the miracle of the unexpected, often in times of grave crisis. We, like the church, can be perpetrators, but we can also be victims. Another aspect of Advent is a vigilant time of waiting alongside the oppressed, in hope, for what we cannot see. For some people it involves fasting, a sign of repentance. For others, it is an advent wreath with daily readings and meditation. Still for others, it is a time to challenge rather than give in to our consumerist global empire.

Advent invites us to remember that God doesn’t come how or when we want. God cannot be manipulated. God can only be received, and most often by those who least expect him. Those on the margins. Those pregnant by accident. Those under tyrannical rule. Advent grows in the church a reverence for the downtrodden and the abused, if we are paying attention. Advent teaches that God comes to those who think they least deserve him.

What if we stretched out Advent across four weeks of waiting, of gestation, refusing to allow Big Corporate Christmas to deliver the baby prematurely?

The first Christian account of the birth of Jesus is not, surprisingly, in the gospels – the four biographies of Jesus’ life, composed within living memory of him. We are accustomed to this first century record of sheep and shepherds, stars and stables. But there is a poetic nativity story that is composed prior to all these histories of Jesus, hidden in the middle of the Apocalypse – the book of Revelation. Written just a couple decades after Jesus’ death, this story is of a woman on the run, being pursued by a dragon. At long last, she is cornered. “The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that it might devour her child the moment he was born”. This child facing the dragon, against all odds, is the child Jesus.

This is the grim situation of people all over the world this Advent, far closer to the original nativity story than our chocolate calendars communicate. And perhaps this is a better text for this year’s Advent, as the world watches the fate of women and children in Palestine, Israel, Ukraine, Africa. The dragon has indeed invaded the lives of so many. The world is holding its breath.

This Christmas let’s up our Advent game. Let’s put dragons in our nativity creche displays. Take out the baby – he hasn’t been born yet! And let’s hold our breath with the rest of the world, sensing the real and present danger. What if we stretched out Advent across four weeks of waiting, of gestation, refusing to allow Big Corporate Christmas to deliver the baby prematurely? What if we used Advent for its original purpose, which is to examine ourselves for our own hypocrisy, our own violence and hatred, our own abuse of power on micro and macro levels? Perhaps then we can truly welcome Christmas. As hope for the powerless. As the possibility for peace in the midst of war. As good news for the world.

As a teenage girl 2,000 years ago prayed in hope,

My spirit rejoices in God my Savior
for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant…

He has cast down the mighty from their thrones,
and has lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.

Explainer

Christmas culture

Creed

19 December 2023

4 min read

Why Christmas Day is Christmas Day

The seasons, festivals, historians and emperors have all influenced the date of Christmas.

Ryan Gilfeather

Ryan Gilfeather explores social issues through the lens of philosophy, theology, and history. He is a Research Associate at the Joseph Centre for Dignified Work.

a had holds out a small wrapped Christmas present.

I came of age in the 2000s, a decade quite alien to us now. We saw ourselves as pioneers of technology, as the internet emerged in its prehistoric form. There was great optimism about the economy until it all went wrong in 2008. The New Atheism movement was roaring into public view, only to wane just as quickly the decade after. Growing up as a Christian, I remember spirited debates with my peers about whether science disproved Christianity and if God can be disproven. These questions have fallen out of view, just as many of its main proponents have too. Richard Dawkins rarely darkens the door of our TV screens anymore.

However, one such moment of conflict sticks out in my mind. A friend announced to me that he had disproved the origins of Christianity. The night before he had discovered that in the third century Roman Empire, before Christianity became legal and the official religion, there was already a festival celebrating a god on the 25th of December. Instead of the birth of the Son of God, the Romans celebrated the rebirth of the Unconquered Sun — Sol Invictus. Then, in 336 under the first Christian Emperor, Constantine, that date was first celebrated as the day of the birth of Christ. My friend considered the case to be closed; surely the birth of Christ was merely a repurposing of an existing festival?

Thankfully this shocking revelation did not pick away at the foundations of my faith. I continued, and still continue, to believe in and love the Christian God, as revealed in the Bible. Indeed, since that moment I have trained as a scholar in the history of the early Church, and have begun to see this question for what it is, a quirk of history.

We, therefore, celebrate Christ’s birth on the 25th December on account of a quirk of history, a result of the way that Romans mapped significant events on to the waxing and waning of the light.

The first claim that Christ was born on the 25th December appears in the third century. Sextus Julius Africanus, a Roman Christian historian, wrote an entire chronology of the world from creation to AD 221. He considered March 25th to be the date of creation, because it was the spring equinox in the Roman Calendar, a day which represents new life and new birth. For this reason, he likewise considered it to be the date of Christ’s conception in the womb. Crucially, nine months after that falls December 25th. Although I admire his logic, it is hardly a sound basis for establishing the date of our Lord’s birth. Indeed, other Christians didn’t accept this claim at the time either.

As already mentioned, December 25th was a significant date in the Roman calendar already. It was the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, after which the days begin to lengthen. It also shortly followed the popular Roman festival of the Saturnalia. Already endowed with significance, it is unsurprising that the Romans began to celebrate the rebirth of Sol Invictus, and the birth of another god, Mithras, on that date.

At this time Christianity was an illegal religion, persecuted in some parts of the Roman Empire. However, in 312, the emperor Constantine converts to Christianity and in 313 makes it a legally tolerated religion. At this point he begins to invest the church and Christians with powers, wealth and privileges. Evidence from the Chronography of AD 354 suggests that Christmas was first celebrated on the 25th December in 336, during the reign of Constantine. Perhaps this was an attempt to dislodge existing pagan holidays, and replace it with a Christian one. Or, maybe the significance of the Winter solstice made that date most plausible. Indeed, it is easy to see how the commemoration of Christ coming into the world is particularly salient as the darkness begins to recede. The true answer is, of course, lost to history.

We, therefore, celebrate Christ’s birth on the 25th December on account of a quirk of history, a result of the way that Romans mapped significant events on to the waxing and waning of the light. The true lesson here though, is that it simply doesn’t matter what the actual date of Christ’s birth was. Our records, and those available in the early church were simply not good enough for us to ever know. What matters is that God loves us so much, that he became human to bring us back to his side in everlasting joy and peace. We have no idea on what date Christ was born. But, each year the 25th December presents a time for us to remember that God became man, so that we might have everlasting life.