Funerals are one thing, festivities are quite another matter.
And Haman proceeded to say to King Ahasuerus: “There is one certain people scattered and separated among the peoples in all the jurisdictional districts of your realm; and their laws are different from all other people’s, and the king’s own laws they are not performing, and for the king it is not appropriate to let them alone. If to the king it does seem good, let their be a writing that they be destroyed. -- Esther 3:8, 9.
Part of what Haman told the king was the way it truly was with the Jews. No matter where they lived throughout the realm of Persia, as scattered as they were, they kept to themselves … they kept ‘separate’ from what the Persian’s did. Like Jehovah’s Witnesses today, they too were “no part of the world” that they lived amidst. The one Persian “law” that they would not perform, which Haman stretched into being many “laws” broken, was that Mordecai refused to honor an Amalekite … namely Haman himself.
It is unimaginable that the Jews in the above scenario would so much as engage in ANY of the Persian festivities, celebrations that were surely going on all around them throughout the year. If they had mixed in such a way, then there wouldn’t have been the contrast of which Haman tried to impress the king with. According to Haman, though being scattered the Jews remained “separate” and their “laws [custom’s] were different”. Separate how? Undoubtedly much the same way that Jehovah’s Witnesses today are separate from the world around them. If "Christmas" had been a practice of the Persians in Esther’s day, can you imagine all the Jews jumping right in and indulging in the same festivities? No they would NOT have done so, not any more so than they shared in whatever it was that the Persians practiced. /Yadirf
Daniel 11:35 ... a KEY prophecy that must be fulfilled before the "time of the end" gets underway.