Finding Christmas

As I've been getting older, I find that I sometimes have trouble getting in the "Christmas spirit" like I did when I was a kid. Maybe it's just because when I was little, all Christmas meant to me really was the excitement of getting new stuff. You know, waking up and realizing you finally made it through the agonizingly long night, going downstairs to find the tree all lit up and a beautiful unknown haul of presents under it... that kind of stuff. I think decorations also seem more fun and festive when you're a little kid, and they certainly aren't just another task that needs to be completed. Anyway, Christmas was definitely joyful to me when I was a child, albeit possibly not for the right reasons.

Somewhere along the way, though, you start to realize that presents aren't always going to be enough. I've always known what Christmas is really all about (Linus in "A Charlie Brown Christmas" anyone?), but I think my young brain had a bad disconnect between that and what actually happened around Christmas. Good tidings of great joy=...presents?? Now, I realize of course that Jesus gave us the best gift and that's why we give gifts on Christmas, and I love giving gifts to people I love! All I know is, I was at the mall yesterday buying said gifts, and I left feeling depressed despite the fact that I got some really cool stuff I'm excited about giving.

Here's a poem I wrote most of a long time ago (and without thinking about Christmas) that describes some of my thoughts today:


Search Engine

A search for entertainment, from desire to forget
the pains already suffered and prevent the ones not yet,
a fight to disengage the mind and not to know, just feel:
we can only live when happy; deeper feelings we conceal.
So the cycle will increase just as it always has before,
an insatiable desire reaching out for more and more.

A search for education, to remember we aspire,
to learn why things aren’t working out through knowledge we acquire,
and so the mind is stretched while the emotions just congeal:
we trust only what we understand and nothing else is real.
But as we learn, the more we know at some things we must guess:
disillusionment reversed, reaching into less and less.

A search for something different, but what difference does it make
in a Nutri-sweet and plastic world where everything is fake?
Still the imitations indicate that real things do exist,
and they might be there for finding if we only can resist
the current that pulls down around and kills beneath the fall
to go through instead of under, to where truth is all in all.



I guess maybe I'm just tired of all the fakeness. I'm with Charlie Brown: Christmas is way too commercial. And man, if he was worried about that in the '60's, what would he say now? See, I'm all in favor of gifts, but I'm worried that we're skipping the part about honoring and remembering Jesus' gift and just using it as an excuse to go whole-hog into the materialism that is probably the #1 besetting vice of American culture. I know he would want us to celebrate his birth, but I can't help asking: is this how he would want us to do it?

It's this materialistic tendency, I think, that can make all the best things about Christmas the things that we end up hating. Maybe that's why I like How the Grinch Stole Christmas (both versions) more than almost any of my friends do. I identify with the Grinch! I also think the modern version is really on to something with this idea of Christmas as a search for something. Unfortunately, they chose to express that insight through the song, "Where are you, Christmas?", a song that is almost tolerable when that cute little who sings it, but completely insufferable when sung by Faith Hill or whoever it was in the credits. In any case, that song (like so many other secular songs) is inches away from being a Jesus song. It has an excellent grasp of a real problem... but then it offers a worthless solution.

The solution offered by the song is, however, close: it suggests saving Christmas by having love and joy in our hearts. Great, now how do I do that, especially when I have to go to the mall filled with shoppers that generally tend to seem much more angry than loving and workers that seem far more depressed than joyful? That could just be because I'm such a last minute shopper... but still. The key thing is, there's no way I can just generate these good feelings. In the terms of my poem above, I can't entertain myself into forgetting my pain, and I can't intellectualize it away. I desperately need a third option, but I find it obscured by a lot of fakeness and annoying decorations.

I'm not trying to be a downer here. I think the state of Christmas in America is pretty sad, but there is one thing I like about it: it gets people searching. It's also the one time every year when the gospel message gets on national tv (thank God for Linus!). Hopefully, when people get tired of the cheap imitations, they'll realize that the mere proliferation of imitations means there must be something real somewhere. There is real love to be had, and real joy comes with it. That's why all I really want to do this Christmas is worship God and spend time with people I love. What if we focused on that instead of making a part-time job out of managing/purchasing/looking for Christmas? As I'm trying to shift my focus, I'm noticing that the real joy and peace that are supposed to be associated with Christmas spirit have come to me from the Father and his love! Have we ever thought that maybe the "Christmas Spirit" should be the Holy Spirit? I ask because the Spirit is the one who reveals the Father's love and the joy of being saved by Jesus to us, and we'll never find Christmas until we find Christ.