Hellenic Problems #149:
When your co-religionists want to re-imagine the Dionysia as Substitute Christmas.
I want to talk about this. Specifically, about trying to imagine Ancient Greek or Roman holidays as Christmas, or other modern holidays, mainly because you still want to celebrate.
In Ancient Greece and in Ancient Italy, the majority of festivals were local, cultural festivals. You had a few state-wide ones, but largely, the festivals celebrated by the common people were local festivals of harvest, birth, marriage, astrological events, etc. that were fairly unique to the region. When people from Ancient Greece or Italy went elsewhere, they celebrated the regional festivals of that place (case in point, the way Alexander’s Macedonian officers behaved when they were given positions in foreign countries he’d conquered). There was a marked tendency among those people to see the gods of other peoples’ as versions of their gods, but worshipped in different ways, so when they went to other regions they would ask, “How do you worship Zeus (or anybody else) in this place?” Then they would worship in that way, so as not to offend the gods, who were obviously accustomed to being worshiped in that way in that place. People also took household gods and rituals with them when they moved from place to place, which is how the pantheons grew to be what they are. So while a family would celebrate local cultural holidays in the region where they had moved, they would also hold private celebrations of their own that were traditional for them.
Basically, what this boils down to is that Christmas is a cultural holiday in the US of A as well as other places and even if you are Hellenismos, you can celebrate Christmas. It’s a cultural festival. It’s been so thoroughly secularized that you really don’t have to worry about the Jesus aspects of it if you don’t want to. The same goes for Halloween/Samhain. Even if it’s not Hellenic, our respective cultures are celebrating it – American Culture is celebrating Halloween and the larger Pagan culture is celebrating Samhain. So in the interest of celebrating with our neighbors, there’s nothing wrong with enjoying these holidays and festivals even if they don’t have RELIGIOUS meaning for us because they have CULTURAL meaning for us.
So you really can just have Christmas be Christmas and Halloween be Halloween. It’s okay. If you want to make observances to the gods during these times, be my guest, I doubt they’d see anything wrong with it since it’s been going on for at least three thousand years, probably closer to four.