Christmas – peace to men on earth of good will!

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IN a few days’ time, all the Christians in Sarawak are going to celebrate Christmas, to commemorate the birth of their Saviour Jesus Christ in a humble manger in Bethlehem 2009 years ago.

Although Christians make up only 9.1 per cent of the country’s population, about 47 per cent of Sarawakians are Christians of various denominations. That makes Sarawak the state in Malaysia with the greatest number of Christians.

Christmas is a day of great rejoicing across the length and breadth of our Land of the Hornbills, because the birth of Christ did herald redemption and salvation for mankind.

Although I am not a Christian, Christianity has touched my life deeply since I was educated in English at St Joseph’s Secondary School in Kuching. I even took catechism classes and Bible Knowledge from Form 1 to Form 5, and studied philosophy of religion in university, so I am not unfamiliar with Christian teaching.

Etymologically, the word Christmas originated from a compound term meaning ‘Christ’s Mass’. It is derived from a Middle English word Chrisemasse, and from an Old English term Christe maesse, which was first recorded in 1038.

Nowadays, Christmas is pretty much a universal festival, and it is also celebrated where Christians do not form a majority.

Major exceptions — where Christmas is not a public holiday — include countries like China (except Hong Kong and Macau), Japan, Saudi Arab, Algeria, Thailand, Nepal, Turkey, and North Korea. No thanks to Hollywood, with their numerous Christmas feel-good movies and pop songs, including their invention of Santa Claus, non-Christians tend to get the perception that Christmas is the most important festival on the Christian calendar.

Actually, until today, the Catholics still insist that Easter Sunday is a theologically more important festival, because the crucifixion and the resurrection of Jesus Christ of Nazareth is the fulfilment of the ancient prophecy of his identity as the saviour.

Still, Sarawak Christians celebrate Christmas with great joy, with prayers, masses, and sumptuous family meals. Some of them also have open house to entertain goodwill visits from fellow Christians and Sarawakians of other faiths. Such is the excellent interfaith relationship between Sarawakians of all races.

Christmas celebrations are full of symbols, and the foremost symbol must be the jolly plumb robed figure of Santa Claus or Father Christmas.

Nowadays, most scholars acknowledge St Nicholas as the original Santa Claus. He was the Bishop of the Lycian port city of Myra in modern day Turkey in the fourth century. He was known for his generosity in helping poor people.

Once he heard that an unfortunate poor man was going to send his daughters to work in a brothel to earn their dowries. He saved the poor girls from that horrible fate by throwing three bags of gold into the man’s house at night through the window. This tale probably earned him his reputation as a giftgiver.

The legend of St Nicholas grew over the centuries in medieval Europe, until he became the patron saint not only of sailors, but also of children.

The English Father Christmas probably evolved out of a separate origin from that of St Nicholas on the Continent.

The earliest reference to him comes from the mid-15th century, when a Sir Christëmas appears in a carol, although most discussions start with Ben Johnson’s early 17th-century old Captaine Christmas.

Whilst strenuous efforts were made by the puritans of the 17th century to do away with this character, they did not succeed. In the 19th century Father Christmas benefited from the general Victorian revival of Christmas and can be found in, for example, Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’.

However, from the 1870s onwards Father Christmas became increasingly like the American Santa Claus, both in terms of his actions — he started giving gifts — and his appearance, that as a result the two are nowadays virtually inter-changeable.

The American Santa Claus is generally considered to have been the invention of Washington Irving and other early 19th-century New Yorkers, who wished to create a benign figure that might help calm down riotous Christmas celebrations and refocus them on the family.

Santa Claus received a huge boost with the advent of cinematic films, and with subsequent generations of movie remakes, he has become the guy living in the North Pole with his team of elves making presents all year, and then driving through the sky in his carriage drawn by reindeer on Christmas eve to deliver presents to all the wellbehaved children of the world.

Christmas celebrations have always been mired in controversies for religious purists in the Christian world.

For instance, they feel that many of the symbols that western societies have come to associate with Christmas were taken from non- Christian pagan traditions that pre-date the birth of Jesus. Specifically, symbols such as decorated trees, mistletoe, holy wreaths, and Yule logs all have non- Christian origins. From a historical context, ‘Christmas’ only recently adopted these long-standing winter traditions into its own identity.

In recent decades, many Christians have complained that the Christmas celebrations have been overcommercialised.

This year, the toy manufacturing factories in China and the retail industry throughout the US and Europe are all hoping for a mad rush to the shopping mall to pull their fledgling economies out of the current financial slump. This is the one festive season that sees Americans and Europeans spend the most money shopping for gifts for their children and for one another.

Christmas shopping is so important to the economies of these developed countries that the colours, symbols and music of Christmas fill the air in all shopping complexes and mega-malls. Restaurants and nightspots advertise their orgies of food and drink for their special Christmas Eve offers.

The unseen hand of capitalism has indeed created the impression that Christmas is a season for compulsive consumption of consumer goods and for excessive feasting and drinking, and the original spirit of love, hope, and faith brought by the birth of Jesus Christ is largely lost upon a hedonistic world.

I am sympathetic to this criticism of how Christmas is celebrated in our modern day world. Fortunately for Christianity, the economies in North America and Europe are still struggling in the doldrums, and so the orgy of buying and feasting is unlikely to start early!

I am glad that most of our Sarawak Christians live in the countryside, and so they are unlikely to be lured and corrupted by pervasive consumerism.

I am told also that 90 per cent of the Bidayuh community along the Kuching-Lundu road are Catholics, and they are very devout Christians.

I remember one year when I had to drive from Kuching to Lundu and back days before Christmas. By the time I had to return, it was always during nightfall. We drove for miles and miles through the sprawling wilderness, and passed many kampung houses with bright windows, from which we could hear group singing of joyous hymns and carols accompanied by guitars.

Today, many years later, I still have the vivid memory of those soothing songs of peace and love emitting from the middle of the Sarawak jungle.

You have no idea how moved I was when I heard them! We live in a troubled, violent, and uncertain world, with many dogs of war dotting the global map.

Daily, we are served real time TV news fare of acts of extreme cruelty of men against men, in all corners of the world. We have grown numb to the tragedy of religious zealots blowing themselves up just to kill innocent bystanders. This world still very much belongs to the Devil, according to the Christian narrative.

That is why Christmas is so important to our cultural and spiritual life: it signals the perennial existence of Good in our midst, so that flames of love, hope, and faith will forever burn bright in the breasts of men and women.

As our Christian friends throughout the length and breadth of Sarawak renew their Christian faith and celebrate the birth of their Christ, we must one and all join in their prayer for peace in the world.

Christianity is a universal religion, and so we can happily join hands with our Christian friends in spreading their universal message of love: “Love your neighbours as yourselves!”

It is important to remember that on this good earth, there are no strangers; there are only neighbours whom we have yet to meet.

(The writer can be reached at [email protected])