Scorpion,
My apologies to you. I wasn't thinking you were christianising a pagan event. On the contrary. I was actually agreeing with you, but also explaining why I think Christmas lost the reason it was placed over a pagan festival and why santa claus is more important or central to the celebration than Jesus.
I do apologize myself, but to be honest, syncretism is one of the issues I have to deal with every day in my work and it's a subject that does interest me greatly. So often it's easy to look at other cultures and see how they have christianised their world view without changing their behaviour, yet in our western countries it's something that happens all the time.
I think the topic was one worth raising, if only to look closely at our own culture and see just how far from Christianity values, morals and practises our culture is going.
thanks for the interesting discussion.
Blessings to you
Carol