Christmas Winter Solstice

I love the sky, it allows me to wonder, hope and imagine. I love to teach my children to identify the big and little dipper and to find Polaris the North star. It is important for me to admire all that I see and observe it for all of the ways it is useful, beautiful, wasteful or whatnot. I have always regarded Christmas as a Non-Christian holiday or Pagan but didn't know what that was...well: Pagan or heathen, a follower of a polytheistic religion, one who has little or no religion and who delights in sensual pleasures and material goods : an irreligious or hedonistic person. Yule was an indigenous midwinter festival celebrated by the Germanic peoples, absorbed into celebrations surrounding Christmas over time with Christianization. The earliest references to it are in the form of month names, where the Yule-tide period lasts somewhere around two months in length, falling along the end of the modern calendar year between what is now mid-November and early January The Yule, mistletoe leaves, wreaths, decorated evergreen trees, And the Winter Solstice (shortest day of the year, followed by longer days and shorter nights) were long celebrated and renamed Christmas as to conform with the new founding of America. you can read more here or if you would like a more biblical reading, go here. I knew the day was not exactly christian but I loved to get gifts, get time away from school or work to spend time with family, and to eat the great meals. I am sure you, no doubtedly, can sympathize with the experience of Christmas, so I wont delve into how I used to wait for Santa, or how my Christmas list wasted more paper than school projects as I changed it. Now, however, I now am nearly disgusted by the idea of a huge lie surronding my faith, and how it is collectively encouraged by our whole American society.....and over the shortest day of the year where the eart receives the least amount of sunlight(darkness), I smell Satan. I love Jesus Christ. He is my Lord and savior. He captures my loyalty with testaments like: Matthew 6:25 “Therefore I tell you, so not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they do no sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they are? 27 Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life? and Matthew 22: 37-39 37 Jesus replied, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ I do not doubt that Jesus lived, died, and arose to show us the way to live. Though every Christmas season I make controversy in my own heart by taking my kids to visit Santa, putting up a Christmas tree, driving around to look at Christmas lights, intensely stressing over satisfying my loved ones with perfect gifts that I can never ever afford (even feeling guilty when I cannot afford a gift for someone I truly love). I cannot continue toggling back and forth between the pressures of the world and the responsibilities and freedoms in Christ, my God in the flesh. The Winter Solstice and any other pagan holiday that does not glorify God is of no importance to me. The sky including the sun, moon, stars and all else is for signs, to tell the time and seasons. I'm leery of becoming a sky watcher because my little wisdom comes from the God, and life is happening around us, not above us, so i want to be in the present. I don’t want to celebrate Jesus' birth more than I want to praise him for the messages that survived through time to help me and so many others, and for his willful crucifixion. I can pardon myself out of enjoying Christmas because of sheer confusion and suspicion, I can join back another day if I so choose, but for now celebrating the shortest day of the year isn't quite the most important thing to do to me. Somehow, even knowing this I doubt I can trust myself to not celebrate with my family, eat the meal, or to accept and give gifts. Any thoughts?