I live in a
household of word-lovers. Conversations are thick with puns and creative word play, so it wasn’t too surprising when I announced to my son the other day that I was planning to dematerialize Christmas this year, his predictably melodramatic response was, “No, Mom, no! You can’t make Christmas disappear!”
Of course, we both knew I was merely beginning my annual oration about limiting gift lists and concentrating on the non-material aspects of the holiday in an attempt to downplay the gifts and focus on The Gift.
What we celebrate at Christmas is God’s gift of His Son to die for our sins. If you are a Christian, you may respond, “Well that goes without saying”….and, unfortunately, it does go without saying in many homes, and not only the homes of those who are actively antagonistic or dismissive of Christianity. Many Christians have also allowed the commercialism and sentimentality of the season to push the true meaning of Christmas to the side.
It might make us more appreciative of what Christmas means in the world today if we were to imagine what it would be like if I actually could “dematerialize” the historical event and we were able to see a world without the influence of Christianity. It is an historical reality that Christianity has impacted the world for good. From the fields of higher education and medicine, to law, government, and science, much that we have today we owe to Christians and their beliefs. We can observe countries where the Christian influence has been historically limited to get some idea of what the whole world might be like, if Christ had never been born.
This realization, alone, should be enough to make more of us take a few moments to really celebrate Christ’s birth.
Give gifts, have parties, bake cookies, and decorate to your heart’s content, but please take just a few moments to remember why we celebrate and Who it’s all about.
December 2, 2012]
As many of you know, I write Christian fiction as J.B. Hawker. If you would like to receive updates when I have a new book, or a promotion, you can sign-up for my monthly email newsletter by clicking on the gift box (below). Your Thank You gift is a collection of my Christmas short stories and recipes, Cozy Christmas Sweets:
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