Tenchi
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Isaiah 9:6
6 For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.
6 For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.
There was a time, decades ago now, when almost every home I passed in my neighborhood had Christmas lights of some sort strung up on trees, or bushes and along eaves and windows. In those days, it was also common to see nativity scenes arrayed on lawns, or illuminated figures of wise men and camels traversing roof tops, following a star.
Not now. No, these days, fewer and fewer people light their homes in celebration of the Christmas season and almost none do so with any overt acknowledgement of the birth of Christ. I haven’t seen a nativity scene gracing a front yard in the month of December for many years. In my neighborhood, Christ has disappeared from Christmas.
Who cares? Let Christmas be about family, fun and giving (and getting) gifts. Aren’t these things enough? Why make Christmas religious? Doing so excludes people – the non-religious, or people of other religions – and this isn’t loving. God wants us to love, right? Isn’t Christmas all about love? So, we should open Christmas to everybody; let everyone take part in Christmas. But we’ll have to leave out the Jesus stuff, then.
What is Christmas without Christ? Well, we can see pretty clearly now what it is: Anything you like. Christmas can be Kwanzaa, or Krismas (if you’re a Kardashian), or Yule, or Human Light, or The Festive Season, or whatever. Fill your front yard with penguins, or snowmen, or palms trees and beer kegs. It doesn’t matter; Christmas is anything – and so it is nothing.
Nothing? Really? Well, if Christmas can be anything, it isn’t any particular thing, right? It’s just another holiday, shaped to whatever the individual wants to make of it. No one can say, “This is what Christmas should be,” because Christmas has lost all objective meaning. Like much of modern culture, Christmas has been highly subjectivized: Christmas is what I say it is, not what you, or anyone else, says it is. And so, if Christmas is just whatever, it is nothing in particular, which is to say nothing, really, at all.
What’s wrong with this? Why can’t Christmas be shaped to whatever we want it to be? Why does Christmas have to stay settled in its ancient roots? The celebration hasn’t, of course, remained firmly embedded in its historical religious origin and the result has been that the commemoration of Christ’s birth has grown increasingly, inane, materialistic and meaningless. Just go to your local mall a couple of weeks before Christmas and truly look at what’s around you. You can find almost anything to hang as an ornament on your Christmas tree: Poodles, race-cars, Darth Vader, even naked women are all available as adornments for it. Christmas cards illustrating the event of Christ’s birth are long gone. Now, it’s an image of a drunken Santa on the card, or a smirking cat in a red toque and scarf, or a golf cart hauling a bag of candy canes – anything but baby Jesus in a manger.
Yes, there are the trappings and traditions of the holiday that still provide some motivation for it – trees, classic movies, a big family meal (or two, or three), a few days off work, a whole lot of sentimentality, endless cycles of tedious Christmas music – but it’s become “sound and fury signifying nothing.” Doing Christmas requires a significant investment of time, energy and money, so the pay-off ought to be at least somewhat commensurate with the investment. But with the profundity of the holiday largely eliminated, and in its place just…whatever, well, the pay-off is often pretty dismal.
And so, more and more people are wondering why they should bother with Christmas at all. It’s just a chance for retailers to make a whole bunch of year-end money, they think. The entire “season” has become intensely mercenary, materialistic, consumerist. Especially in affluent nations, though, where people can obtain what they want pretty much all the time, a particularly concentrated session of consumerism is largely useless and, for many, kind of annoying – especially when doing so is disconnected from anything deeper than an impulse to get more things.
Who likes feeling manipulated into making expensive “holiday purchases” just because past generations thought it was important to buy gifts at Christmas, or pressured to do so by some vague “spirit of the season”? Maybe at one time a religious dimension to the holiday justified buying gifts and provided the spirit in which they were given, but now that all that stuff is gone, what’s the fuss about? In an affluent nation, buying can happen any day of the year – and does. What’s so special, then, about Christmas? Well, nothing, actually, if Christmas is just about getting more stuff.
Let’s make our own meaning, then; let’s work up our own sense of profundity and importance for Christmas (we won’t call it Christmas, though). We’ll install new, arcane rituals into the holiday, arbitrarily choosing to make Nature, or Life, or Family, or Peace (or all of them together) the Main Thing(s) about it. Anything but Christ, the Saviour, our Immanuel.
There’ll be candles and sober proclamations about “meaningful things” and a lot of self-congratulation at the ingenuity and wisdom of forsaking the old, stupid Christian holiday for a new, modern, relevant one. Most importantly, the new holiday won’t get in the way of having a good time. Booze, music, food, sex – all the usual physical, sensual things humans crave will be made “sacred” by association to whatever “higher” ideas or virtues the new holiday enshrines. In this way, one can be entirely self-indulgent throughout the holiday but filled with a sense of one’s own nobility at the same time.
(Continued below.)