It’s Christmas: Live It Up!
admin December 20th, 2007
I have obsessed about, and railed against the commercialization of Christmas for as long as I can remember, but I’ve stopped doing it this year for two reasons:
1. The Christmas celebration is a latecomer. The church made December 25 the official date of Christ’s birth at least in part to coincide with the traditional and vastly older winter solstice celebrations. It was an attempt to ‘Christianize’ and tame those celebrations which had a tendency to get out of hand. So from a purely historical point of view, it is the Christian fervor for celebrating Christmas that for over 1,500 years has been trying to overtake secular celebrations rather than the other way around. People have always loved a winter celebration to chase away the dark, cold nights.
2. I saw a TV news report recently about an organization that was trying to force national and multi-national chain stores to use the greeting “Merry Christmas” in instead of the politically correct “have a happy holiday” in an attempt to “put Christ back into Christmas.” The program director was interviewed as part of the story, but he was so angry in his strong-arming righteousness that he took Christ right out of Christmas in front of millions of viewers. The interview convinced me that our theological correctness might be making us the Grinch who not only stole Christmas, but actually made it’s real meaning unrecognizable.
So I’ve become convinced that our real job as Christians at Christmas time, is not to try to tear down or block millennia of emotional desires to party at the darkest time of the year, but rather to make our own faith and practice deeper and more meaningful. It is where our hearts are that matters, and we have enough difficulty managing even that, much less forcing all of secular culture to play by our rules, no matter how worthy they might be.
We don’t have to stop everyone else from Christmas binge shopping or thinking the holiday is all about getting a lot of stuff. But we do have to stop ourselves, as practicing Christians, from doing that same thing. And we are responsible for nurturing a deeper, more faithful Christian celebration within the Christian community.
If we attend to living our lives as Jesus taught (a hard enough job), some of those folks who are addicted to consumer culture as we once were (and maybe still are), may want to join us, because it is not only a deep faith that shows in how we live, but also because we are not busy condemning others at the same time.
I guess it boils down to my no longer wanting to spend the Christmas season angry at consumer culture instead of celebrating Jesus’ birthday.
So let’s live it up and celebrate the festival of Jesus’ birth as only Christians can. Let’s put that light up on the table so others can see it and perhaps join us because it’s a better way. It may be a better way to spend our time.