Got a great message from Anita this morning that said:
BESERKO!!!!!!!!!!
I already feel like crap because of all the sugar…my tongue is sore, my gall bladder is doing flip flops and I am still hungry, hungry, hungry!!!
GOD! Let it be over!
I love you………………………….
hahahaha. I am over here laughing. I agree with her totally. Oh my God. Too many chocolate covered cherries. Too many frosted Santas. Aaaarrrrrgghhhh.
Merry Christmas.
For Christmas this year I want a personal trainer, a gym membership and a personal chef to keep my calorie intake at 1200 a day.
There really is something about sugar being a drug that sends the body’s chemistry completely out of whack. Scientifically, I don’t know what that is, but it’s true thing.
There really is something about having someone (besides yourself) around to motivate and inspire you and kick your butt …
So it’s Christmas morning. It’s really a day like any other day, when you think about it. We give it the meaning it has for us. We carve it out as a special day of the year. It’s not even really the day Jesus was born. Many think his birth is in autumn. No one really knows the exact day of Jesus birth day but almost everyone agrees it is NOT December 25th. The date is not mentioned anywhere in the bible.
In the bible it says the night Jesus was born “country shepards living out in the fields, keeping over their flocks by night” and during this region from December – February it was too cold to keep flocks of sheep out at night.
But we’ve carved this day out – Christmas – as a symbol of the day to celebrate and remember his birth.
The celebration of Christmas originally began as a pagan holiday that the Romans invented. Here’s some interesting info:
A far more likely scenario is that Jesus was born in the autumn, around the time of the biblical Feast of Tabernacles (Leviticus 23:34-36), when Joseph and Mary would have traveled to Jerusalem to keep the Feast along with thousands of other Jewish families. This also helps us understand why in the town Bethlehem, a few miles to the south of Jerusalem, “there was no room for them in the inn” (Luke 2:7)-the town would have been crowded with other travelers keeping the Feast at this time of year. (For additional biblical evidence that Jesus was likely born at this time and not on or near Dec. 25, request our free booklet Holidays or Holy Days: Does It Really Matter Which Days We Keep?)
The Oxford Guide to Ideas and Issues of the Bible (Bruce Metzger and Michael Coogan, editors, 2001) say that “Christmas, Twenty-five December was by the fourth century (A.D.) the date of the winter solstice, celebrated in antiquity as the birthday of Mithras (an ancient Persian god) and of Sol Invictus (the `unconquered’ sun god). In the Julian calendar the solstice fell on 6 January, when the birthday of Osiris (the Egyptian god of the dead) was celebrated at Alexandria. By about 300 CE (A.D.), 6 January was the date of the Epiphany in the East, a feast always closely related to Christmas.
“The earliest mention of 25 December for Christmas is in the Philocalian Calendar of 354, part of which reflects Roman practice in 336. Celebration of Christ’s birthday was not general until the fourth century; in fact, as late as the fifth century the Old Armenian Lectionary of Jerusalem still commemorated James and David on 25 December, noting `in other towns they keep the birth of Christ”.
Modern Christians should be shocked that as late as the mid-fourth century not all Christians had yet begun celebrating the pagan festivals of Christmas and New Year’s. The Oxford Guide also notes that Christmas has its roots in the winter solstice, celebrated anciently as the birthday of the sun and the Persian deity Mithras.
“In the Julian calendar the twenty-fifth of December was reckoned the winter solstice, and it was regarded as the Nativity of the Sun, because the day begins to lengthen and the power of the sun to increase from that turning-point of the year. The ritual of the nativity, as it appears to have been celebrated in Syria and Egypt, was remarkable. The celebrants retired into certain inner shrines, from which at midnight they issued with a loud cry, `The Virgin has brought forth! The light is waxing!’
“The Egyptians even represented the new-born sun by the image of an infant which on his birthday, the winter solstice, they brought forth and exhibited to his worshippers. No doubt the Virgin who thus conceived and bore a son on the twenty-fifth of December was the great Oriental (i.e., Middle Eastern) goddess whom the Semites called the Heavenly Virgin or simply the Heavenly Goddess; in Semitic lands she was a form of Astarte (also known as Easter). Now Mithra was regularly identified by his worshippers with the Sun, the Unconquered Sun, as they called him; hence his nativity also fell on the twenty-fifth of December” .
Nowhere in the New Testament can you find one iota of scriptural evidence that Jesus or any one of the apostles ever kept Christmas or taught anyone to keep this pagan celebration.
Would Jesus keep Christmas today?
Faced with these historical facts, and God’s clear instruction about mixing pagan practices with worship of Him, we can conclude only that Jesus would not keep Christmas today. Christmas is, in fact, an affront to Him.
HAHAHAHAHAHHAHA. Crack me up.
Yes, Jesus wants us to celebrate him, just as much as he wants us to celebrate EACH OTHER … but not as a ritual based on laws, tradition or rules.
To read the entire article, click here.
Why am I telling you all this?? To remind you to keep it simple. Today is a day like any other day. We, as humans, have added the meaning.
I love you. Today and always.
We should be celebrating Jesus every day of the year. We should be giving gifts every day of the year. We should be with family and friends every day of the year.
The reason the holidays are so stressful for so many people is because it’s artificial holiday. We rush around trying to make it look like something out of Country Living magazine or Better Homes and Gardens. We try to make a dinner table that would make Martha Stewart proud.
When, really, in truth, we just want to relax.
So try to relax today. It’s a day like any other day. It’s Tuesday. It’s December. It’s a beautiful day to tell the people you love that you love them. Just like yesterday, and just like tomorrow.
Merry Christmas.
I love you! Merry Tuesday to you, Lisa!