I'm not a historian or a religious scholar so let me just repeat two things I've read/heard that make sense to me:

* Early Christians decided to celebrate the feast day for Christ's Birth (that's right; no one ever claimed it was his ACTUAL birthday until fairly recently. Apparently morons can't wrap their tiny brains around a symbolic celebration, only a "birthday") around the winter solstice because they could party at the same time as every one else (in the Roman Empire) without standing out and getting their heads chopped off/fed to the lions/heads chopped off then fed to the lions;

* When the Roman Empire turned Christian, they adopted many of the pagan celebrations and just assigned them Christian justifications so people didn't have to give up the fun stuff.

Because the earliest mentions of December 25 as the feast day precede Rome's acceptance of Christianity, it's probably some combination of 1 and 2. Or maybe some other stuff. Like I said, I'm not a historian. But all this discussion is only secondary to my primary point, and that is The Gap is so vapid and useless they don't even know how irrelevant they are and I want to puke in one of their blue drawstring bags and mail it to the president of the company with a note attached that says, "You are so stupid you make me vomit."

Because of this commercial (and this one, but that's more about the horrifying little spoiled rotten snots in the video. If that's what the Übergirls have as future sorority sisters, I better start training them in armed combat now.):



Here's why the early Christians were smarter than The Gap (I'm using them as an example here of Corporate America, because Commerce is in the midst of taking over Christianity (other major religions to follow) and adapting it to ITS message. That is a post for another day.) The Christians took the pagan stuff and gave another set of meaning to the symbols and practices in place. Commerce wants us to keep up these rituals because it feeds its gaping maw of insatiable greed, but isn't offering us any real reason to do it other than... fun? But soon enough, they will become empty gestures and die out, because materialism is ultimately unsatisfying.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, you can't "86 the rules" without replacing them with something. Well, you can, but it's not going to work very well.