Christmas has supplanted our traditional festival — Rosicrucian member

A member of the Rosicrucian Fellowship, Cape Coast Centre, Mr. Charles Essel Moses has said the term Christmas and its associated activities are new and something introduced by the white people.

He however noted that the celebration itself is not entirely new to ancestors of this land.

"I cannot tell what name our ancestors gave or had for the festival they celebrated at the end of the year, but normally they would pour libation to the dead and seek their help in the coming year.

"Once this was done the ancestors got excited that if the living are remembering the dead, then they needed to do something for them. This is what our ancestors normally did around this time," he stated.

He added that with the coming of the white man the beginning of the celebration of Christmas which faded out has been supplanted by that which was brought by the white man.

Essel Moses was contributing to a panel discussion on GBC Radio Central’s 'About Life' on Sunday, 27th of December, 2020, hosted by D.C. Kwame Kwakye.

"With the passage of time, our ancestors realised that during the celebration of Christmas the whites did a lot of good to their fellow man to signify that Christ was born and who would be offered as a ransomed sacrifice for humanity and the living needed to emulate same," Mr Moses explained.

"Christmas has we have it is a foreign phenomenon which has been infused in to our religious calendar and culture and there is nothing pagan about it. Even what our ancestors did was something that was worthy to them and not necessarily fetish as is being speculated".