Recently I was speaking with Father Jerome of FSU’s Oriental Orthodox campus ministry. I mentioned that the Orthodox have a different way of calculating the date for the celebration of Easter. If you want to get into it, the way that Easter is calculated is that Easter is always the first Sunday after the full moon following the vernal (Spring Time) equinox – this was decided as early as 325 at the Council of Nicea. However, Orthodox churches use a different calendar that says that the vernal equinox is on our April 3. Our calendars will tell you that the vernal equinox happens on March 21st. Therefore, we have differing Easter celebrations. When I mentioned Easter to Father Jerome though, he mentioned something else, he said, “did you know that we have a different Christmas too?” Some people just don’t like playing with others I suppose. 
I did remember reading that the Orthodox celebrate Advent for 7 Sundays instead of our usual four, but I never quite knew how this worked out until our discussion. Father Jerome told me that they celebrate differently for the two days – they celebrate “our Christmas” (December 25th) with family, but then celebrate “church Christmas” on January 7th. I was hoping for something else, honestly, because celebrating on January 7th would give almost a solid two weeks more of Christmas shopping time which always seems to fly away before I can get Amazon Prime to deliver stuff.
This does bring up my two traditional Christmas hobby horses: 1. That Christmas isn’t over on December 25th and 2. that the celebration of family and the celebration of Christmas are and should remain two different things. First of all, we’re a Western-calendar church as Lutherans which means that we celebrate December 25th as Christmas, but we are also liturgical Christians which means that we celebrate Christmas as a season rather than just as a day – so get to the gym, because you’ve got a lot of eggnog to drink until the end of Christmas. Christmas is December 25th to January 6th, and those 12 days are celebrations of Jesus coming to be with us, to be born into our humanity. Secondly and much more importantly, as much as I hate to ruin 99% of the Hallmark channel movies for you, Christmas isn’t a “celebration of family.” Sure, Jesus got a human family on….well…whatever date He was actually born on, but that doesn’t mean that our response should be to idolize our families. I know, I know, I’m Scrooge or the Grinch or Krampus or Lucy van Pelt some other character from the dark side of Christmas when I say that, but I say it because I care – I care about Jesus and I care about you.
Here’s the deal: we worship God who is perfect. That makes Him a good object for our worship because He’s not going to let us down. In fact, our worship of Him is simply receiving from His perfection. However, our families are not perfect, and “celebrating family” puts a lot of pressure on your family to be perfect. And they’re not. By the way, you’re family to somebody too, and you know how rotten you can be. You need a Savior and so do they – so celebrate the Savior, not the saved. Celebrate WITH the saved, celebrate by teaching the story of the salvation TO your family, but don’t fall into the easy trap of “celebrating family,” because worshiping created things has a long track record of disappointment. So instead of joining our Orthodox bi-polar express brethren with their dual Christmas, let’s keep one Christmas, let’s make it long…like 12 days long…and let’s make it about the right thing, the joy we feel that we have been saved, along with our families, because Jesus joined our human family in order to be the sacrifice that would save us. Merry Christmas.