The War on Christmas: I’m with the Atheists on this one

Seriously, the gospel has been commercialized enough in the past hundred years – must we defend the commercialization of Christmas too? Why do I want Best Buy greeters telling me “Merry Christmas”? Christmas isn’t a Christian holiday anymore. At least not in America today. It’s a completely secular holiday based on capitalism and making sure you buy people gifts of an appropriate price range so as not to offend or disappoint.

If anyone cares to celebrate the birth of Jesus on Dec 25th this year, then I’m all for it, but let’s admit that whatever Christmas is – it’s not that. It’s fun, it makes me smile, I get great gifts, the music is joyous, the gift giving is fun. I like Christmas. It’s just that I fail to see the connection with it and Jesus’ birth.

From what I hear, early Christians often gave each other food and other needed provisions. I’m not sure what these “needed provisions” were, but my guess is that they were similar to iPod’s, PSP’s, and PS3’s. They also apparently gave to the poor and needy. Again, I’m not sure what they gave, but I think it’s safe to assume that poor and needy people would have needed a tree with L.E.D. lights and copious amounts of eggnog.

So don’t get me wrong, I celebrate Christmas just like most everyone else. We’ve got the tree and the decorations, and the advent and all that jazz. We give and receive gifts (with a heavy emphasis on the receiving end at my mom’s house). So Christmas is a blast for me. But it’s just not particularly how I’d celebrate Jesus’ birthday if I were going to do that.

That makes me wonder. What would I do if I were going to celebrate the Big Guy’s birthday? Growing up my mom would always ask me to make a list of what I wanted and where I wanted to go for dinner on my birthday. So maybe that’s the question, “Jesus, what do you want for your birthday and where do you want to go for dinner?”

My answer was always something like “a playstation, a remote controlled car, an architecture book, and Alexander’s Steak House.” I'm sure Jesus would say something similar, so this year I’ll get him a remote control car and we’ll go out to Denny’s (after all, it’s all that’s open on His birthday).