For the past 10 years or so, I've struggled to enjoy Christmas. From a child's perspective, it's great: You get nearly two weeks off from school, a mythical fat guy brings you free stuff and your biggest responsibility is to keep your snowman from melting. As an adult, however, the holidays are far different. In the past seven years, I've only had a few Christmases off, and holidays usually mean picking up the slack from vacationing co-workers. Not only that, but the typical holiday fare about commercialization and the "war on Christmas" pops up in the stories I help publish. Legalistic Christians say "merry Christmas" simply to be spiteful. The holidays also bring up unpleasant memories of the last couple of months of my father's life. I had to watch him battle cancer, one of the most painful illnesses one can get. So you'll forgive me when I say that I haven't looked forward to Christmas since I was in high school.
My spiritual life has grown and changed significantly since then, and, accordingly, I view Christmas through a different pair of eyes. I saw a holiday crafted by the Catholic Church in order to accommodate former pagans. They didn't have an exact date of Christ's birthday, so they took a pagan god's and gave it to Jesus. Today, most mainstream Christians still celebrate Dec. 25 for Jesus, in spite of its pagan origins. Hopefully you knew most of that anyway.
Let's get this straight: I still don't think packing malls and spending tons of money we don't have to buy Chinese-made crap for people we don't like honors Christ. I don't care how many retailers try to wrap their agenda in a sparkly package and sell it the day after Thanksgiving to a crowd ready to trample each other to death. But I'm learning that a lot of things are a matter of attitude. We teach in the church that love is a choice. So is having a good mindset. In Romans 14, Paul says, "For the Kingdom of God is ... living a life of goodness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. If you serve Christ with this attitude, you will please God, and others will approve of you, too." Attitude is everything.
So I've taken it upon myself to look at the Christmas holiday not with ridicule, but with acceptance and joy. In the same chapter of Romans, Paul says, "So let’s stop condemning each other." In other words, if someone genuinely enjoys Christmas as a day to honor Christ's birth, I'm not acting in love if I bust out my ol' Ebeneezer routine. Who am I to say that person is wrong?
However, we're not to conform to the customs of this world. That means analyzing every tradition and seeing if it lines up with Christ's commands. If downing a couple bottles of Jim Beam and dancing naked in a lampshade at the company Christmas party is part of your tradition, perhaps it's time to amend that. If slugging soccer moms in Target on Black Friday while clawing for an iPod is your idea of Christmas cheer, perhaps you should re-evaluate your priorities. And Santa Claus? Well, I hate to break it to you folks, but he's about as close to a modern-day pagan god as we're going to get.
I think if you embrace the good and toss away the rubbish, you'll be able to make it through Christmas without being hauled away to the nuthouse. At least that's how I was able to survive.
No comments:
Post a Comment