Santa or the Savior?

aiki said:

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. ​

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 entirely 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 your tree. Christmas cards illustrating the event of Christ’s birth are long gone. Now, it’s an image of a drunk 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 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.

Besides, 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.

So, we’ll make our own meaning, 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.

Revamping Christmas doesn’t seem to be working, though. Not from what I can see. Take Christ out of Christmas and the holiday season develops an enormous vacuum of meaning and purpose. Fun, family, food and toys just can’t make up for the Greatest Gift, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the World. There is no compensating for the loss of the Savior, our Creator and Life, as the sublime Center of Christmas. We’ve tried other things for several decades now: the seasonal noise of “White Christmas” and “Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer”; Santa and his elves, Frosty the Snowman and The Grinch; candles, ribbons, tinsel, and lawn ornaments. But, migrating year-by-year further from Christ, the holiday has diffused into a myriad of tepid, superficial counterfeits of the true celebration of the birth of the God-Man, Jesus Christ, that is Christmas.

Of course, what I’ve described thus far isn’t true across-the-board; there are those who still maintain lots of enthusiasm for a more “traditional” Christmas - but not, usually, in a totally unadulterated way. There’s a mix of Christ and consumerism in their celebration of the holiday, a blending of “good tidings of great joy” and Santa Claus shooting down chimneys, of worship of humanity’s Savior and eating oneself into a food coma. As a result, there can be significant tension in this sort of celebration of Christmas, a looking unto Jesus and the sober, eternal, spiritual purposes of his advent into human history at one moment and then a looking away to the sparkling pageantry and raucous “cheer” of the World at another. It’s hard to keep balanced in this circumstance, isn’t it?

Here’s a thought, though: Is there a balance to be struck? Ought Christ to be balanced with worldly traditions? Should eternal, spiritual things be muddled together with temporal, material things? Is the sublime profundity of the story of Christ’s birth properly framed by reindeer, snowmen, turkeys and blinking lights? I’ve no hard-and-fast rule to offer in answer to these questions, but I would urge Christians to have the celebration of Christ and his birth the prime priority at Christmas. All the gift-giving, and songs, and feasting, all the decorations and rituals of the season, ought to be under, and in clear acknowledgment of, the commemoration of the coming of the “Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the World.”

We can do without toys, and parties, and garland but we absolutely cannot do without Christ. Jesus is the “The Way, the Truth, and the Life,” the God-Man who came to save us from the eternal consequences of our sin, from the “darkness of blackness forever.” More, though, he offers us in himself daily fellowship with God right now. Through the virgin-born Savior we can walk in joyful communion with the Ground of All Reality today. Think on it! Our Creator, the Creator of All, the Maker and Sustainer of the universe, of the countless trillions of stars, of galaxy-devouring black holes, of mind-boggling supernovas and incomprehensible expanses of empty space, offers to us communion with Himself! And He makes such an offer, rather than compelling us as puppets, bound under His power, mindless slaves to His will, because He is a loving God, a God of mercy, grace, faithfulness and truth. This is what makes Christmas the “most wonderful time of the year.”

Or, you can eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow you die.

Christmas is just another distraction from the brevity, pain, and ultimate meaninglessness of life, without the Incarnation lying in a manger, worshiped by shepherds and wise men. So, give me Jesus. Give me the Life, Truth and Way to God who was wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. I can do without the rest of the stuff crammed into Christmas but I can’t do without Christ, my Savior.

Luke 2:8-14
8 And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.
9 And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.
10 And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.
11 For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord.
12 And this shall be a sign unto you; You shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.
13 And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,
14 Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

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