Hi all, been a bit ill past few weeks so my post pretty much dried up. Picked up a seasonal lurgy, you know the type, nasty cough that refuses to go away and with the very cold weather it just wouldn’t shift.
So today its Christmas eve and I want to talk about a couple of things that I have been thinking about regarding Christmas, do I celebrate it now that I am a Bahá’í, and how traditions change and merge and melt together.
To Celebrate Christmas or not???
This is something that has played in my mind the past few years and lots of people ask me about it, and mostly its about whether or not Bahá’ís celebrate Christmas. The short answer is no, Bahá’ís do not celebrate Christmas, its not a religious holiday for us. You see we recognise all the prophets as Manifestations of God, and if we celebrated all of their festivals, then well that’s all we would ever do!
But personally I don’t think that’s the be all and end all of Christmas, its a festival which is about, charity, generosity, family, goodwill to all men, unity and peace, and those are ideals which any Bahá’í would agree are good things, and as well as this, its a cultural festival as well, its part of me, its what I was brought up with and its not something I can just drop, because its so ingrained into my cultural background.
So I prefer to put aside the whole commercialism of Christmas, and forget about the presents being the most important thing, they are nice to give, but they are not the be all and end all of Christmas. The aforementioned charity, generosity, family, goodwill to all men, unity and peace are the main things about this festival. I have been trying to stick to educational toys for my nephews and younger cousins and more charitable gifts for the rest of my family, with varying degrees of success, sometimes that cute little spider-man costume is just too much to resist, not for me, my nephews of course!
My wife and I are moving towards making our main gift-giving festival Ayyam-i-Ha, and by the time I have children I hope that this will be more important to them than Christmas, but I think I will still celebrate Christmas with them, as a cultural thing only mind.
I see it a bit like how non-Bahá’í Iranians celebrate Naw-Ruz, not as a religious holiday, which it is not, but as a part of the Persian cultural background, its important to them to maintain that tradition, and its one of the things that makes them who they are. Going a little further, most Muslim families I know celebrate Christmas for the same reasons as I do, for the cultural and the whole peace and goodwill thing, one whom I spoke with today said that he felt its something which allows his children to connect with their identity as Brits, which he thinks is a good thing.
Merging Traditions
Someone told me recently that the only reason people get married is to have an excuse to not spend Christmas with their family, well I don’t think that’s true, for me family is an extremely important part of this festival, but it is fascinating to see how my wife and my family traditions regarding this time of year are merging together to form new traditions for our embryonic family.
We come from very different backgrounds, religious, cultural, socio-economic, geographical etc, in many ways our families are complete polar opposites, and we both have very different family traditions, and living together we find ourselves really building new ones. For example, my family have dinner at 3pm, while Lindsay’s have theirs at 12 noon, so somehow without talking about it, we have ours at around 1pm, its just happened like that. My family tended not to have parsnips but Lindsay’s did, and so we have parsnips, but we do them roasted with some chilli and paprika with leeks and carrots, something neither of our families did, but I am not keen on the taste of parsnips so we figured out something that keeps us both happy, and we have done it for a few years now!
And its all these little things which this year in particular, I am noticing in a big way, for me its sort of showing how we are really starting to have our own family identity emerge, something that we will no doubt pass to our children who will go on to take our traditions and merge them with their spouse and create their own new traditions.
Anyway Merry Christmas, here is praying for peace of Earth and goodwill to all men.
God Bless
Michael
