Yesterday Michael Medved played a recording on his show of a group of some sort singing a song called “Santa Claus Will Take You to Hell.” It put me in mind of anti-Christmas Christians I’ve encountered in the past.

I do not trust such people.

I remember one guy I met years back who was (I’m not making this up) an itinerant Bible teacher and vacuum cleaner salesman. He had inside information informing him that the Christmas tree is not a pretty, festive symbol of eternal life, but a Tammuz Tree, an idol devoted to the Babylonian god Tammuz (whose festival, oddly enough, was in the summer). Anyone putting a “Tammuz Tree” in their home was delivering their household over to Satan, he informed us.

He said that Easter was a heathen festival as well.

I have a lot of respect for the Puritans, whose contribution to our national development has been, I believe, undervalued for a few decades. But they had their blind spots. One was their rejection of Christmas, on the grounds that the Bible nowhere commands the celebration. The logic is simple—we’re only allowed to do what the Bible specifically permits. Thus the principle (which I’ve read as being a Puritan one; correct me if I’ve been misinformed): “Everything not forbidden is mandatory.”

We Pietists had the same problem. “When in doubt, forbid it.” It fostered an attitude toward life that made people reflexively fearful and reluctant to enjoy God’s gifts.

I think we need to remember that the Bible’s picture of Heaven is not an eternal Bible study, nor even an eternal church service.

It’s a party. A wedding feast. And not a Norwegian Lutheran wedding feast, but a Jewish one, where there would be wine and dancing.

I told the vacuum cleaner salesman, before I stormed off in a cloud of cowardice, “I don’t believe Christ came so that we would celebrate less.”