Cards Carols & Claus

The festival called Christmas is a celebration still 'under construction'. It is a weaving of story, myth, customs and ritual. Since its inception, it has been debated, ignored, celebrated, banned, and from the mid 1800s, reinvented.

As such, it is the most human and lovable, and easily the most popular season of the year involving nearly all the population.

The Christmas customs bring to the surface a kind of public 'everyday secular' spirituality that is beyond the power of Christianity or the institutional church to de ne or control. While it seems there will always be people for whom Christmas is a pious devotion rather than a festival or carnival--o en interpreting the biblical nativity narratives literally as the 'real Christmas story'--such people have always been in the minority. Indeed it may not be going too far to say that Christmas has always been an extremely difficult holiday to Christianise!

In this exploration by one of the leaders of 'progressive Christianity' in Australia, author Rex Hunt shares a brief story of the celebration of Christmas as a global and hybrid celebration; focuses on the Australian celebrations of Christmas as expressed through such popular culture events as: (a) participation in Carols by Candlelight, (b) the sending and receiving of Christmas Cards and (c) the popularity and traditions around the 'red-and-white' Santa Claus; and o ers some of the suggestions and results from progressive biblical criticism of the birth narratives of Jesus/Yeshua of Nazareth and resulting doctrines from those narratives.


Rex A. E. Hunt is a retired minister of the Uniting Church in Australia. He was Founding Director and Life Member of The Centre for Progressive Religious Thought, and Chair of The Common Dreams Conference of Religious Progressives, Australia and South Pacific. His web site of Liturgies and Sermons is visited regularly, by people from thirty five countries around the world.