Duggar Family Christmas Card Is Actually Birthday Card — For Jesus!

The Duggar family Christmas card says “Merry Christmas” in small letters. But big, bold type above a group photo of the entire, massive Duggar clan, reveals the Christmas card’s true purpose. This is not a Christmas card at all.

This is birthday card. To Jesus.

The Duggars, as is widely known from the Duggar family’s TLC reality show 19 Kids And Counting, have 19 kids. But the family portrait on this year’s card features not a mere 19, but 28 Duggars, spanning four generations of the Arkansas family who have become as famous for their religion of Christian fundamentalism as for their prolific procreation.

The Duggars have been outspoken opponents of gay rights and matriarch Michele Duggar recently played an instrumental role in establishing legal discrimination against gays and lesbians in the city of Fayetteville, Arkansas, when she recorded a telephone message encouraging voters to overturn an anti-discrimination ordinance because, she falsely claimed, it would allow men to use women’s restrooms.

That the Duggars sincerely hold deep religious convictions is beyond question. Which is why it should be no surprise that their family Christmas card is emblazoned with the message, “Happy Birthday, Jesus!” And in the “Merry Christmas” inscription below the photo, the “Christ” in “Christmas” is spelled in all capital letters.

But do the Duggars have the correct birthday for Jesus? Most religious scholars agree that the December 25 date of Christmas was chosen not because Jesus was actually born on that day, but more likely as an act of salesmanship.

Since the date, or a date close to it, was traditionally celebrated in ancient, native religions as the day the Sun is born, early Christians, some historians say, adopted the date as the birthday of Jesus in order to help recruit people who believed in traditional religion into the new Christian cult.

Biblical texts, scholars say, offer few clues to the actual date of Jesus’s birth. Not even the season in which Jesus was born is specified. However, in one Biblical passage — Luke:2:7-8 — shepherds are described as tending to their flocks during the time of Jesus’s birth. If that detail is accurate, it would rule out the winter months, which were rainy and chilly in ancient Judea.

The gospels also specify that the parents of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, were on their way to Jerusalem to participate in a census. Such census-taking in the Roman-ruled Middle East took place only in warmer months, not in December.

Early Christian writers from the first few centuries of the current era placed the birthday of Jesus on any number of days, from November 18 to March 8.

According to the Duggar Family Christmas card, however, there is only one birthday for Jesus, and that’s Christmas.