Modern Christmas does exactly what a holiday tradition would do -- manipulation to use the pleasure of the senses to rear children from birth with seasonal repetition and feedback loops to implant loyalty in them.
Plato Laws
>Pleasure and pain I maintain to be the first perceptions of children, and I say that they are the forms under which virtue and vice are originally present to them. As to wisdom and true and fixed opinions, happy is the man who acquires them, even when declining in years; and we may say that he who possesses them, and the blessing which are contained in them, is a perfect man. Now I mean by education that training which is given by suitable habits to the first instincts of virtue in children;--when pleasure, and friendship, and pain, and hatred, are rightly implanted in souls not yet capable of understanding the nature of them, and who find them, after they have attained reason, to be in harmony with her. This harmony of the soul, taken as a whole, is virtue; but the particular training in respect of pleasure and pain, which leads you always to hate what you ought to hate, and love what you ought to love from the beginning of life to the end, may be separated off; and, in my view, will be rightly called education.
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>I am glad to hear that you agree with me; for, indeed, the discipline of pleasure and pain which, when rightly ordered, is a principle of education, has been often relaxed and corrupted in human life.
Modern Christianity wouldn't fare well without it: if not that children are raised from birth with memories and the association of pleasure with Christianity and pain with being cast away from Christianity. Goyslop holidays is what keeps the youth invested in Christianity... without this goyslop bringing the affection of the youth and cultivating them, Christianity would be worse off.