Holiday trimmings

The Fanning family remembers 2010 as the “simple Christmas year.” At the time, Lora Lynn Fanning had five kids at home, all under the age of 5. She and her husband also felt God tugging at their hearts to adopt.

So, by the time the holiday season rolled around, they were pinching pennies—trying to scrape together enough money to bring their new daughter home from Uganda. Fanning sat her little ones down and told them they wouldn’t be dashing off to the lot for a Christmas tree that year. No gifts, either.

It wasn’t just a financial decision. “The Lord provides,” Fanning said. “There are ways to get gifts.” It was also an intentional effort to shift her kids’ anticipation from getting gifts to celebrating Jesus.

“We had already noticed the confusion at Christmastime of ‘we’re excited about gifts, and Mom and Dad are harping on Jesus,’” Fanning said. Saving for adoption gave Fanning and her husband the freedom to rethink their approach to the whole season—instead of feeling obligated to celebrate the same as always.

But as the Fannings’ scaled back their celebration, millions of other Americans did just the opposite—rushing to department stores and shopping malls for the biggest and best. According to Gallup, holiday spending has grown steadily since the 2007 recession. Americans now expect to dish out an average $975 on gifts even though as many as a quarter are still battling last year’s debt.

Still, not everyone’s on board with the ballooning Christmas mania. Many Christians, like the Fannings, are tired of all the excess and are opting to celebrate more simply—or to skip the holiday altogether.

Debates over how to celebrate Christmas are nothing new for Christians, according to Bruce Forbes, a Methodist minister, retired university professor, and holiday historian. He started researching Christmas for a PowerPoint presentation a college staff member asked him to share with students in 2001.

Since then, he’s spent much of the last two decades diving deeper into the history of Christmas and other holidays. So much so that his friends call him “the holiday guy.”

One of the most surprising things Forbes discovered in his research was that early Christians did not celebrate Jesus’ birth. In fact, they didn’t even celebrate regular birthdays, considering it a pagan practice and preferring to honor martyrs on the days of their deaths.

But the Romans, along with many other cultures, observed midwinter festivals. “When you enter winter, it’s a little like walking into death,” Forbes said. So what would ancient peoples do when the days felt bleakest? “Have a big, blowout midwinter party.”

Back in Alabama, the Fannings set to work crafting a unique Christmas party all their own. They kicked off their first “simple Christmas” by climbing over the fence and cutting down a leafless maple tree from a forested area between two neighborhoods. Together, they hauled it into their open, two-story living room and wrapped its bare branches in lights. Lora Lynn Fanning jokingly called it “the naked tree.”

Still, Fanning thought it was beautiful. “I cried over it all the time, because it felt to me like the Charlie Brown Christmas tree.”

That year, it was easy to get the kids on board with downsizing Christmas because they had a concrete reason for switching things up: a little sister in Africa. After that, simplifying Christmas became part of their family identity. “It was just what we did as Fannings.”

Every year, Fanning would send a kid out to the woods for a branch to decorate. “They make fun of us for it now,” she said. But it became “the tradition.” And each day of December, Fanning would add another candle to the kitchen table as a “visible, tangible” expression of “going from darkness to light.”

They still exchanged gifts with extended family. But instead of getting Christmas gifts for their kids, the Fannings decided to give a family donation to a ministry of the kids’ choosing.

Now the family’s Christmas mornings revolve around another ritual—a big brunch where they hand around letters and pictures from the ministries they’ve supported in the past year. Fanning says it’s the part of Christmas that even the kids who aren’t sold on any tradition still really love.

Martin Luther with his family on Christmas Eve Painting by Bernhard Plockhurst, 1887/CLU/Getty Images

IN NORTHERN EUROPE, pagan Yule celebrations boasted many of the features common at Christmas parties today: evergreens, mistletoe, bonfires, singing, dancing, feasting, and drinking. Roman equivalents included the late harvest festival of Saturnalia and a solstice celebration.

After the Roman Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity in A.D. 313, believers gradually started observing annual celebrations of Christmas—an early Roman calendar shows the first one happened as early as A.D. 336.

It’s not exactly clear why Christians made the change, but Forbes has a guess: “Christians started celebrating the nativity of Jesus to make the point that He was divine from the beginning.” (The timing coincides closely with the First Council of Nicaea, where church fathers met to publicly affirm Christ’s deity.)

The date they picked also had meaning. “December 25 was the birthday of the sun god/warrior god Mithra,” Forbes said. Christians put their celebration of Jesus, the Son of God, “right on top.”

That’s a fact Forbes often points out when he hears people fretting about a “war on Christmas.” “When people say, ‘Jesus is the reason for the season,’ and ‘I wish we could go back to the pure, spiritual Christian holiday’ before the modern people—whoever you don’t like—they messed it up,” Forbes said. “What I’m saying to you is there never was a pure Christian-meaning holiday about the birth of Jesus.”

From the beginning, he said, the holiday was always a mixture of the secular and the sacred.

That’s exactly why some Christians say simply revising today’s over-the-top Christmas celebrations doesn’t go far enough to call a prodigal culture back to faithfulness. They see the holiday itself—with its man-made rituals and traditions—as the root of the problem.

LOGAN SHELTON IS AN ORDAINED MINISTER in the Free Church of Scotland (Continuing) and a dad of four who pastors a Presbyterian church in Opelika, Ala. He and his family haven’t celebrated Christmas at all for the last three years. It’s a controversial decision Shelton says people are quick to attribute to a “bah-humbug attitude.” But, for Shelton, it’s a deeply held conviction grounded in a thoroughly Reformed approach to Scripture.

“The Bible is sufficient, which Protestants readily confess,” he said. “The Bible is especially sufficient when it comes to acts of worship, and the Bible has made no provision for any special holy days in the New Testament, other than the Sabbath.”

That idea, known as “the regulative principle,” states that Christians should only worship God in the ways outlined in Scripture. Congregations that hold to the contrasting “normative” view believe any modes of worship not banned in Scripture are acceptable.

Shelton came to his position while studying at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. He had come to faith in his early 20s and eagerly devoured books written by men like R.C. Sproul and John MacArthur. During this time, he also discovered some Reformed churches had historically refused to observe holy days beyond the weekly Sabbath.

In fact, English Puritans held this principle so dear they banned Christmas services in 1644. Although King Charles II restored the holiday in 1660, Christmas fell out of favor and all but died out in England and her colonies for the next 150 years. It took several cultural factors, most notably Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, to bring the holiday back into fashion.

After he pondered those Reformation principles, Shelton knew he couldn’t keep celebrating Christmas in the same way. At first, he tried something counterintuitive: taking “the Christ” out of Christmas. “My gut-check reaction was, try to make Christmas secular after the same manner that I would say Fourth of July is secular,” he said. In hindsight, Shelton admits he was trying to avoid a change he knew would be “disruptive.”

But observing a secular Christmas proved too tricky. “It was very difficult for me to say I can celebrate this day, which is thoroughly religious, in an only secular manner,” he said.

So, in 2020 Shelton and his wife told their families they wouldn’t celebrate Christmas anymore. They got mixed reactions. “Some were very supportive,” he said. “Some were curious, some were opposed.” Some family members mourned the fun Christmas experiences they hoped to have with them.

But over time, he said, most have come to understand and accept the change. And Shelton and his wife have worked hard to set aside other times for family gatherings. “As much as we can, we try to shift all the good things that we liked about Christmas to New Year’s Day, which is definitely secular,” Shelton said.

DESPITE SOME EARLY REFORMERS’ rejection of Christmas, the celebration has a rich liturgical history. And that old spiritual element is finding a new appeal among young believers who are growing increasingly enchanted with high-church practices, according to Winfield Bevins, an ordained minister, an artist in residence at Asbury Theological Seminary, and the author of Ever Ancient, Ever New: The Allure of Liturgy for a New Generation.

Bevins spent two years visiting churches, colleges, and seminaries across the United States, Canada, and England and talking with young people about their denominational leanings. He found something he describes as a “quiet Renaissance” among many 20-somethings.

“It’s not flashy billboard signs. It’s not social media driven. It’s not megachurch,” Bevins said. “It’s a hunger for the heart and soul of historic Christianity.”

As part of that, Bevins said, more and more young adults and families are reclaiming Advent in their Christmas observance. He said the seasons of the church calendar help believers find a sense of belonging inside God’s greater story of redemption.

“We’re part of a great story that started in a manger,” Bevins said. “It started with a baby in a manger and a tiny little out-of-the-way place. And this was the Savior of the world, the King of the universe.”

Ashley Tumlin Wallace grew up Episcopalian, and later became Anglican. But she started attending a nondenominational church as a high schooler in the ’90s because she didn’t understand the “why” behind all the high-church rituals of her childhood. Then, in an ironic twist, she fell in love with, and married, a man bent on joining the Anglican priesthood.

So while her husband attended lectures, Wallace spent her quiet, stay-at-home days as a brand-new mom digging into theological questions on her own. Along the way, she discovered “there was a reason why we did everything we did” in the Anglican liturgy. “And it was actually quite lovely and full of meaning.”

That realization answered a deep longing in her heart to find more ways to “incorporate the things of God” into her home. She found there were daily prayers, traditional recipes, special colors for each season of the church calendar—all things she could use to focus her kids’ minds and hearts on specific pieces of the gospel story. She describes it as a “beautiful way to disciple our kids very naturally.”

At the end of November, that means embracing Advent as a time of fasting and preparation. While neighbors crank up Christmas carols and stock up on holiday goodies, Wallace and her family skip desserts and start listening to Advent hymns like “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.”

Every Sunday evening, they gather around their Advent wreath for evening prayer, or “compline.” Candlelight dances on the walls as one of the kids lights the first purple candle. Wallace said these practical habits help build a sense of anticipation and excitement for the Christmas Eve service.

“As soon as they start that first Christmas hymn, ‘Joy to the World,’ I always tear up,” she said. “Because I’m just so excited that we finally get to sing these songs.”

At the end of the service, all the lights go out. A priest holds a candle and reads from John 1: “In the beginning was the Word …” Then, a glow spreads across the darkened room as congregants light their candles one by one.

“It really is magical,” Wallace said.

Illustration by Mark Fredrickson

SOME THINGS ABOUT THE FANNING FAMILY’S “simple Christmas” have changed over the years. Eventually, the kids “put their foot down and requested an actual green tree,” Lora Lynn Fanning recalls with a laugh. But the heart of the holiday has remained the same.

Recently, Fanning asked her kids for their honest opinions about how they celebrated the holiday. “Did we warp you forever?” she asked. No, they assured her. Christmas isn’t “as shiny-happy” for them as for some of their friends, “but they understand the ‘why’” behind it.

That’s OK with Fanning. “We needed Jesus because the world was dark, and so I’m not sure I want Christmas to sparkle. I want it to start out in darkness and us need that light, need the candlelight to grow, need that breakfast and that fresh breath of air and that ‘sit around in our PJs’ funk of Christmas morning.”

While Christians will no doubt continue to wrestle with the best way to mark Christ’s birth, Bruce Forbes argues they don’t have to be afraid of the holiday’s “pagan roots.” He highlighted the way seventh-century Christian missionaries “baptized” European midwinter traditions and used them to point Frankish, Germanic, and Anglo-Saxon tribes to Christ. Legend has it the Benedictine monk Boniface used the fir tree’s triangular shape to teach the concept of the Trinity, since the evergreen has three points, yet remains one tree.

Forbes compares this kind of cultural contextualization with Paul’s sermon using the Athenian temple to an “Unknown God” to preach about Jesus.

Given the history, Forbes said it makes sense Christians often feel a sacred-secular tension around Christmastime. After his presentations, lots of people tell him the same thing: “You’ve helped me feel less guilty.”

Forbes hopes understanding the backstory of Christmas will help believers make peace with however they choose to spend December. “We’re observing a midwinter celebration, and we’re thinking about Jesus at the same time,” Forbes said. “And if we’re having a hard time balancing that, we’ve got 2,000 years of Christians who have done the same thing all the way along. So we have company.”