Brad Stine Mini-Cast

Is Christmas A Pagan Holiday?

Brad Stine:
So I have all these people telling me that it’s a pagan holiday, right, it’s pagan, and the reason they claim it’s pagan is because they say that the Catholic church decided that they’d taken some pagan holidays. And they said, “let’s just put Christmas onto this day so that we can really kind of get all the pagans to worship all this same stuff at the same time and then maybe they’ll cross over, and come into Christianity.” And a lot of the elements that we use in our Christmas traditions, they say is pagan, and so consequently they feel like you are doing a disservice to your faith and to Jesus because you’re somehow acknowledging paganism. So the premise of that rant was this idea, and it’s always bothered me from the get go, when people stopped using Merry Christmas in the stores.

Brad Stine:
And by the way that’s changed a little bit, right? I did see that after a couple years of people complaining about it, it seemed like they did bring it back and I’ve done, I don’t know, two or three comedy rants on my albums about Christmas and about not say Merry Christmas, it was one of my most famous rants that ended up on the Go Fish song, Christmas with the capital C, about people not wanting to say Merry Christmas. But as I’ve talked about it and brought it up over over time, one of the things that bothered me was this, and we’ll get to the pagan thing in a second, but here’s what I think is more important. People said, “we don’t want to emphasize Christmas, we don’t want to see Christmas.” Because there’s so many holidays in December, we don’t want to leave anybody out.

Brad Stine:
We don’t want anybody to feel left out, we’ve got Kwanza, which is a racial holiday, literally is, it’s for Africans, so even leaves people out, so that’s not very an inclusive holiday. You have Hanukah, which is for Jewish folks, so they certainly could care less if you want to celebrate with them, but it’s basically a thousands of year old tradition for Jews, Hanukah. There’s also boxing day, the day after Christmas, which I think Canadians invented because they were perceiving that there might come a day in their country where they are boxed in and not allowed to leave because they don’t have the proper vaccine, and so they created a holiday that one day, if they could ever use it, to beat on those who were trying to steal their freedoms, they’d be prepared and they could legitimize it by calling it a holiday.

Wyat:
I always thought boxing day was just meant to set up big pro wrestling.

Brad Stine:
Wyat, that’s a beautiful premise, but why of color the world? How do you conflate wrestling, where there is no punching…

Wyat:
There’s totally punching and wrestling, have you seen wrestling?

Brad Stine:
Fake punching.

Wyat:
Okay, you’re right.

Brad Stine:
God forbid that I… Don’t put the kibosh on wrestling, because that’s about as realistic as it gets.

Wyat:
Don’t you knock on those wrestlers, like Mr. T, wasn’t he a wrestler.

Brad Stine:
I think 50 years ago, so I don’t know. I saw he was 25 years old that he’s drawing a reference from a guy that he’s never even seen.

Wyat:
I know he was on the A-Team, I know that much.

Brad Stine:
He was, that was also in an eighties show, so how did you know…

Wyat:
And there still a problem with the eighties.

Brad Stine:
I just didn’t know that you heard of…

Wyat:
Who wouldn’t? Who hasn’t heard of the eighties.

Brad Stine:
Just people that are numeralphobes

Wyat:
Numeralphobes, oh like me, is that what you say?

Brad Stine:
You’re not a numeralphobe you love your numerals. But here’s what I was getting at, when they took down Merry Christmas, right? And they said, “we want to celebrate Hanuk we celebrate Kwanza, we’re going to celebrate Ramadan, another one that of course Islamic holiday at the same time. They were trying to make this sense that we want everybody to be equally respected, which I have no problem with that. If you wanted to add some, some Ramadan elements, I don’t even know what those are, but if you wanted to throw, sprinkle those in fine, if you wanted to put up a Hanukah candle, be my guest, do whatever you want to do, it’s your store. But here’s what bothered me, they they used nomenclature, that was intentionally not Christmas, right?

Brad Stine:
We’re not going to say Merry, we’re not going to say Christmas, okay. We don’t want to isolate people. But when they would say happy holidays, the elements that they would use to give the sense, the DNA of the holiday, right now that they don’t want to mention, they would have red and green colors, Christmas. They would have tinsel, Christmas. They would have gifts, Christmas. They would have trees, Christmas. They would have bulbs, Christmas. They would have ribbons, Christmas. They would have Santa, Christmas. They would have white hats, Christmas. They would have elves Christmas. They would have stockings, Christmas. They would have black boots with fur around me, Christmas. They would have a burning U logs, Christmas. They would have chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Christmas. They would have sleigh bells, Christmas. They would have reindeer, Christmas, sleds. When’s the last time, just curious, you got in a sled pulled by reindeer? I’m guessing probably not for a couple weeks.

Brad Stine:
It is a complete and utter indicator of Christmas. My point was, we’re going to strip the name away to show our woke inclusiveness, but every single image we will utilize to drive your appetite, to come buy our stuff so we can make money and capitalize off of the capitalistic system that’s created this opportunity of capitalism that allows us to make money off of a holiday that we don’t want to mention, but we’re going to use all of the artifacts that it gave us. That hypocrisy is what I was ranting about.

Brad Stine:
If you don’t want to include Christmas or find that somehow it’s offensive to the 6% of people that don’t celebrate it, don’t use any of our trappings, don’t use any of our fixings, don’t use them. But you won’t stop that because you’ll always be a hypocrite, you will always be a fraud. Wokism leftism is always what it does, it destroys everything it can, but it has nothing to fill the blanks in, so it has to, once again, parasitically steal from a beautiful tradition and leave whatever remnants they can left over, but let’s remove Christmas because we’re showing that we’re really sensitive to everybody else, ball pocky!

Brad Stine:
Now, the people were complaining that all of these traditional elements that I just mentioned, or many of them like the Christmas tree, were pagan. Maybe they were, I haven’t done a lot of research on it, but here’s the part I couldn’t wrap my mind around. I saw one guy say, listen, you’re worshiping a tree. I’ve never worshiped a Christmas tree in my life. You know what I, when I see a Christmas tree you know what I see? Beautiful nature that God invented when I see the bulbs hanging from it and the tensor, you know what? I see a representation of ice and winter and beauty of, of the color of the white snow that has drifted over. And if you’ve ever lived in a state that gets thick snow on Christmas day, it’s beautiful, it’s magical, it makes you feel alive and not one time, am I worshiping a ice crystal. Wyat, have you ever found yourself tempted to worship an ice crystal?

Wyat:
Well, I mean, there was that Sonic ice, which is just magnificent. If there was any ice crystal, I would be tempted for, it’d be that.

Brad Stine:
I got to tell you son, that’s a good point. Just chewing on that ice.

Wyat:
Yeah, it’s so good, isn’t it?

Brad Stine:
You know what I love about that ice?

Wyat:
What?

Brad Stine:
Melts in your mouth.

Wyat:
Well, all ice does, but it just does it so much quicker than the rest.

Brad Stine:
But was this different texture, it’s almost this velvet. Can we call it velvet ice?

Wyat:
There was legally nothing stopping us.

Brad Stine:
There’s my son always looking at the legal ramifications. Well, look, I look at these trees and especially when I grew up, we had real trees, chopped them down, stuck them in some water and hoped and prayed that they didn’t go on fire because somebody always burned their house down every year with a real tree, but the smell. Wyat, do you remember smelling, because we would get real Christmas trees when we were in California, that’s before California… We’re crazy! Do you remember that we would bring home Christmas trees, do you remember that smell?

Wyat:
I think vaguely, that was a long time ago and my smell memory isn’t the best out there, but think I do, it was sticky too, wasn’t it?

Brad Stine:
It was sticky.

Wyat:
Sticky kitchen, and that’s how you knew it was good.

Brad Stine:
That’s how you knew it was good, it was sticky. My son remembers the stickiness, but not the olfactory gland reminiscing of the beautiful wafting of the new trees.

Wyat:
Well, to be fair, in this family sticky is pretty traumatic.

Brad Stine:
Oh, it is. I hate sticky by the way, I’m not going to tell you guys this, because if I’m ever captured by my enemies, they’ll know the worst thing they could do to me to make me talk. But the point I wanted to make is this, those who say that the tree had a pagan origin, maybe it did. I say that Christmas redeemed it and returned it back to the remembrance that God created, the natural order. That he created and allowed snow to drift, that’s not beautiful, but just has this wonderful, unique, one of a kind, crystal that never repeats itself, even though we’ll never know it and needed microscopes to even know they looked the way they looked, we still realize that this was the God of creation, it said, “I can even make each one of these unique and never to be seen again and I can do it forever.”

Brad Stine:
When I saw the colors, the beautiful lights that we’d put outside and I put lights up in my house every year, the old C9’s, I love the old fashioned beautiful colors, it just feels so warm. It feels so beautiful because God gave us colors. So everything that they want to… I’m not going to deny or tell you that historically, maybe there weren’t some pagan traditions that the Catholic church came in and tried to abscond and give it a Christian tense to it, that they could redeem it. But that’s the point of Christianity was to redeem that which was lost, to fix that which was broken, to heal, that which was unhealthy, to bring beauty from ashes. So I don’t understand those who are so adamant about making sure you don’t celebrate Christmas, which is always thought of as Christ, mass, the birth of Christ.

Brad Stine:
Even if it wasn’t on that day, I don’t know the day he was born. You know what? I don’t know what day George Washington was born, but he can still inspire me. I don’t know what day… I don’t even know who else to pick. Abraham Lincoln was born, I don’t know what day he was born, don’t care, he inspires me. I don’t care what day Jesus was born, what I care about is that he did, he was born and that’s the beauty of it. So for all of you who are so adamant to try to make the rest of us say, don’t celebrate Christmas, as though somehow there’s something better, to taking an opportunity for the name of Jesus to be spoken into the atmosphere, and let’s strip it away. If you don’t see that, maybe there’s something odd and counterproductive to that.

Brad Stine:
I don’t understand what you think you’re accomplishing when everybody looks at the Christmas thing as though it has something to do with Christ, that’s how they see it, that’s how they feel. That’s what they are being inspired by what is wrong with that? And if you happen to be watching the video and you really feel like, no I’m missing the whole point, feel free to a comment and maybe some of my people or myself or Wyat for that matter, because Wyat works at Lowe’s, so he has some education and insight, a lot of us will never even begin to touch a bit against. We’ll talk about it, I don’t have a problem with you disagreeing with me, I don’t have a problem with you on, to discuss it, but I want you to justify why removing Jesus’s name from this one special day of the year that’s celebrated around the world, you think is somehow doing a better service to his memory and to God’s intervening into the human condition. Please explain that to me so I can understand where you’re coming from. Wyat, what is your thoughts?

Wyat:
My thought we have some explaining to do Because Kit Kat, Spar, and a host of other people have no idea what we’re talking about when we talk about the Sonic ice.

Brad Stine:
Okay. If you guys have never gone to Sonic, it’s a drive through, it’s kind of like a McDonald, but you can you’ll drive your car up and get them to come out and their skates and bring you the thing. I don’t know if it may not be in the west. It’s not in the west coast, I don’t think it’s in California, the west coast.

Wyat:
Yeah, I think it’s more of an east coast thing.

Brad Stine:
Might be East coast or Southern thing, but anyways, that’s all, and the ice is just really fine and crunchy, but it’s not big, it’s tiny little, almost like…

Wyat:
Somebody else commented that it’s apparently called Nugget ice.

Brad Stine:
Nugget ice, that would say…

Wyat:
It makes sense. Basically imagine a potato tart, imagine it a fifth the size of normal, and imagine it being ice. That’s basically what it is.

Brad Stine:
But it’s just crunch is really good. I think they might’ve given that kind of ice in hospitals as a matter of fact now I think.

Wyat:
Oh really?

Brad Stine:
I think so. Anyways that’s what he was talking about.

Wyat:
Yeah, that’s what we talking about, it’s just nice ice.

Brad Stine:
I wanted to talk about that idea of what happens when people get so caught up in sort of very specific viewpoint that they maybe miss the bigger picture. Now I have another way to discuss that and to discuss the missing the bigger picture by talking about a song that we’ve all heard, we all sang, we all found it fascinating. And yet I found it problematic, I thought that there was something we were missing. And so I did a rant about it and I want to show you that rant, and then I’m going to come back and we’re going to talk about what some people commented on just to show you how easy it seems to be in America or probably any where for people to miss the bigger picture and the one thing they seem to miss with me because they happen to know I’m a conservative, they happen to know I’m a Christian, I’m not apologizing for that and it’s part of my show.

Brad Stine:
I think sometimes when I do my show, they miss the fact that maybe this guy’s all also a comedian, just throwing it out there. I’m going to give you an example, right now. Wyat, if you can pull up Rudolph. We’re going to reimagine Rudolph, I want you guys to watch this and when it’s finished, I’m going to tell you about some of the things that I’ve heard from people who found this a disturbing and inappropriate commentary. Wyat, hit Rudolph, I don’t mean literally.

Wyat:
That would go against what you just said.

Brad Stine:
It would and the SBCA would be all over it.

Wyat:
Right.