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My wife sometimes tells me that I have a dry sense of humor that people sometimes do not understand. Regardless. it has been a very long time since I have been able to laugh as much as I am doing. Thank you, for contributing to my day.

Kevin, I appreciate very much the insight that you regularly bring to discussions in this forum.

However we have misunderstood this. The Bible gives several feasts, most of them were given by Moses for feasts and fast such as Passover and Day of Atonement etc. These celebrations were related to the agricultural cycle of the land. They were celebrated by the pagan Canaanites centuries before Abraham was born. They were the important days in the worship of the Baal religion. The Bible takes these very days and kept the less objectionable parts of their customs but removes the orgies and the idea that you needed to unite your life force to help Baal and the gods of life, and change the focus to rest in God being able to do it all by himself without your works to help and to focus on what God does for us. The Bible tells the Hebrews what they can and what they cannot do on these days. As we read this carefully it should not come to be a big suprise that the lists of dos and don'ts for these feasts came from the pagan celebration where they did both what the Bible commands the Hebrews to do but they also did what the Bible commands the Hebrews not to do. The Bible also gives us other guidelines that can give us guidance on how to deal with say Christmas:　 Later we find the events of Queen Esther which became the feast of Purim. So here we see the Bible addition to itself additional feasts for events worth celebrating. We also have the feast of Hanukkah. You cannot find Hanukkah in the Old Testament. Yet in the New Testament Jesus is celebrating this non-Biblical feast and adds to the celebration the focus on enjoying and appreciating our beloved friends and family and he placed this as the setting for his greatest miracle. While we don't find Christmas in the Bible, we find guidelines that tell us how to relate to Christmas. Seventh-day Adventist follow these guidelines and thus accept Christmas, although volunteer since the Bible does not command us to keep it we do not command people to keep it.

How did December 25 Become Christmas?: The tradition is that the pagans were keeping December 25 from Babylon and that Christians started to say that Jesus' birthday was December 25 starting in the fourth century AD after Constantine made Christianity a legal religion and it was good to take in the Pagans by taking their holiday and making it the birthday of Jesus. I was taught this, we find it in most books, articles , documentaries and sermons. This understanding came from scholars studying the best material available to them a few hundred years ago. However, there have been more discoveries made that those scholars did not have available. We need to update our information. The problem from the story we have all grown up with and have been taught is that there are some fairly new historical discoveries. I just learned about it for the first time in the journal "Bible Review" (it was a sister journal to Biblical Archaeology Review but now they are again just one journal) in either the year 2001, 2002 or 2003 in the November-December edition. Since then there have been a few articles in Biblical Archaeology Review that I've seen, and on some of the newer programs on the history channel referring to this and have been starting to hear it in sermons and a short article about it in either the Adventist Review or one of our other papers. So if you look up the December issues of Bible Reviews in the early 2000s and recent years of the Biblical Archaeology Review you can study this information for yourself. We now know that Christians were saying that December 25 was Jesus birthday starting in the third century, 100 years earlier than we thought. And it was done 100 years before Constantine, by people who wanted nothing to do with Paganism and who were hiding from Pagans in the Catacombs. Then what makes it more complicated was in the second century, 200 years prior to when Christians were supposed to have started to see December 25 as the birth of Jesus, the church has the feast of the Annunciation (where the Angel told Mary that she was going to be Jesus' mother) every year at Passover. The date of the feast was different each year originally depending on when Passover was. Then one year the church changed from the Jewish calendar to the Roman Calendar. That year Passover fell on March 25. The church started to celebrate the feast on March 25 every year thereafter. What is 9 months after March 25? These events were not related to wanting to appeal to the Pagans and the Pagan feasts. In fact some studies have suggested that the evidence is that while the pagans had different holidays that fell in approximately this time frame, that there was nothing special about December 25 until the fourth century and that the Pagans may have taken it from the Christians. But that has more room for debate. Anyway, the current evidence is that it came from taking over a Jewish tradition. During the intertestamental period the Rabbis were saying to expect good things at Passover. A number began teaching that it was Passover when Isaac was born. But others were teaching that it was Passover when the 3 men came to Abraham, two went on to Sodom and Gomorrah and the third, who turned out to be the Lord, told Abraham and Sarah that at the appointed time Sarah would give birth. Thus that Sarah got pregnant with Isaac at Passover and that he was born 9 months later. (Guess when that would place Isaac's birth?). Then they were also saying that it was on another Passover, the anniversary of either Isaac being conceived or the anniversary of his birth that Abraham took Isaac to sacrifice him but God provided the substitute. In the second century AD (200 years before Constantine) the church and synagogue split into two religions. This was a very sad time in the history of God’s people. Like a divorce people on both sides were hurt and would lash out to cause pain to people on the other side. Frankly I like the idea that we got this from the pagans better than the fact that it came from this sad time in history. One of the things the church was saying in it’s lashing out at the Jews was that Christians were better than Jews because Isaac was merely a type of Jesus while Jesus was the better antitype. Church leaders drew in the second century AD drew parallels that said that as the Angels and the Lord visited Sarah and Abraham that Passover day and announced Sarah's pregnancy and Sarah gave birth to Isaac 9 months later. So the angel visited Mary and the Lord entered Mary's womb on a Passover day and Jesus was born 9 months later. Thus with the feast of the Annunciation use to be first every Passover and then changed to March 25 and the events surrounding the church-synagogue split and the Jewish tradition on Passover and Isaac is indication that we got December 25 from the Jews and not the pagans. (Note: That year the rabbis and synagogues in Greece said that Passover was April 6, and they changed from celebrating the feast of the Annunciation every Passover to every April 6 and this affected on how some eastern churches celebrate Christmas on January 6). Now, we most likely have the wrong date, however we do have the correct event! And also this is the same season as Hanukkah that John connects to the raising of Lazarus, thus focusing on the importance of enjoying our loved ones and to have hope that when our loved ones die that death is only an interruption and that one day we can be reunited with our loved ones and never ever part again!

To be clear: If my wife knew that a female was hiding under my bed, my wife would chase the female away.

Shall suffer persecution

In view of Stinsonmarri's post, I feel a need to clearly say that in no way did I intend to imply that she was a Jesuit hiding under my bed. As a matter of fact, I am confused as to how either she or any other person could think that I might have implied that she was a Jesuit. To set put this in context, for any who do not know: Jesuits are all male. There is no such thing as a Jesuit female. My understanding is that Stinsonmarri is a female. I would never imply otherwise. Further, I would never consider Stinsonmarri to have any desire to hide under my bed.

BTW, I brought up the connection with charity and Christmas. And I stand by it and would not be cold hearted enough to suggest people not give in memory of Christmas spirit because it might be a "pagan" day. It is just a reality that needs increase during the winter and people may need a reminder to keep giving more than the rest of the year. As I already said, all days belong to God and you can go around the calander and find a pagan named day (every day of the week has a pagan name. I suspect we all use them every day. So, are we worshipping pagan gods?), a day of a pagan god's birthday, and even heinous things done by pagans. They should not have "dibs" on every (or any) day of the year! AGAIN, as EGW wrote, "... You can make it like the world if you have a disposition to do so, or you can make it as unlike the world as possible." We are allowed to celebrate the birth of Jesus on any day of the year we choose and it has worked out how it has.