I was blessed to grow up in Risingsun, Ohio next door to my Grandma and Grandpa Hoover on their farm that embraced where we lived, surrounding us with its loving arms on both sides (until the age of 11) and behind, with our woods over yonder a bit, that I loved to walk through as a boy, always looking for my "brother" hawk, circling overhead, to greet me.
Anyway, besides my parents, Grandma and Grandpa Hoover always made sure we had a rich Christmas celebration, in every sense of the word. We always went to their house, next door (an orchard field in between us), on Christmas eve and to my Grandma King's in Fostoria on Christmas Day.
Grandma Vivian Hoover always made sure we had plenty of wonderful homecooked food and baked goods of every kind and different types of fudge and peanut brittle (my sister Sue and Grandpa liked it), and that we each had ten presents to open. She bought year round from mail-order catalogs and hid them upstairs somewhere. She also preferred the blue Christmas lights, like the candles in the windows, and always had us bring down the box with her artificial tree (because she was allergic to the real thing) and the horse sleigh bells to put around the front door and candy canes for the tree...
As kids, my sisters and I, we always wanted to open up our presents right away, but Grandma would leave that decision to dad to decide if we ate first or not. We ate first (which is undoubtedly wise).
So I know the warm and lovely cherished Christmas memories many have, having experienced them, but once I learned that such holidays are actually pagan in origin, unclean observances that the Great Creator God of the Bible forbids His children, and that God wants us to enjoy family and friends and wonderful memories keeping His biblical festivals that are kosher, I promptly stopped keeping Christmas and started keeping God's holy days with His blessing. Now I try and help expose Christmas is an abomination to others who might have never known otherwise!
I hope and pray for America, and our Israelites peoples everywhere who have been Gentilized in too many ways, to remember our Hebrew roots (identified at the website of Brit Am Israel) and biblical responsibilities and draw closer to our God and increasingly further away from those ways and days He strongly disapproves of since God loves us.
David Ben-Ariel, a Christian-Zionist writer and author of Beyond Babylon: Europe's Rise and Fall, shares a special focus on the Middle East, reflected in hard-hitting articles that help others improve their understanding of that troubled region. Check out Beyond Babylon.
