Merry Christmas is not just for Christians

These are the facts that are generally agreed to by historians.  Sometime between 6-4 BCE Jesus was born.  He was a devout Jew who traveled and preached lessons of love and peace around the hinterlands of Galilee between roughly  27 and 33 CE.  He got on the wrong side of the law and was executed.  Other details of his story have been up for debate. Thomas Jefferson is well known for the parts of the Gospel story he rejected, but he firmly believed in Jesus’s most pivotal message. Jefferson wrote:

His moral doctrines, relating to kindred and friends, were more pure and perfect than those of the most correct of the philosophers… and they went far beyond… inculcating universal philanthropy, not only to kindred and friends, to neighbors and countrymen; but to all mankind, gathering all into one family, under the bonds of love, charity, peace, and common wants and common aids.

The “most correct philosophers” Jefferson had in mind were the ancient Greek and Roman thinkers, who wrote extensively about love. For them, love was often tied to virtue, reason, and mutual excellence—something cultivated among equals and governed by merit. What Jesus did that truly rocked the world was to expand the very meaning of love. Love was no longer merely a sentiment or an attraction, but an action. It meant doing good for those you did not know, those who had wronged you, and even those you might not necessarily like. It was about offering aid to the stranger, the foreigner, and anyone in need of help.

Christmas is the day when this idea entered history. A world marked by this kind of love would look quite a bit different than it does today.