For everything there is a season, a time for every activity under heaven. (Ecclesiastes 3:1)I love Christmas. But something has happened, something bad.
Christmas was special when I was a kid. I know that it was a shopping thing, too, but without quite the desperate frenzy today.
Thanksgiving came, all the stores were closed. The day after Thanksgiving, the stores all opened with decorations galore. People had come in on Thanksgiving, or that night, and had transformed the stores into a Christmas wonderland.
Christmas carols began to be played. Santa came maybe that Saturday, maybe the next.
I was in WalMart this afternoon, and the Christmas stuff is in full force, complete with Christmas carols being sung loudly over the PA system. In fact, you began seeing Christmas stuff before the end of Halloween.
We were in the mall Wednesday and Santa will be there this weekend. The mall is decorated to the teeth. Even the Salvation Army bell-ringers are out already.
What used to be a great thing has become desperate. The Christmas carols over the sound system sound desperate. The decorations say please come buy things. Keep us afloat another year. We care nothing about Christmas and the reason behind it. All we care about is the corporate bottom line.
The personnel in one of the stores (a grocery store, of all places – a place where no one goes to shop for Christmas) remarked that she was already tired of Christmas carols and it is just the middle of November.
So what do we do? I truly do not know. One thing I think is to make our displeasure known when Christmas decorations start going up in October. Maybe that will do something if done over the course of a few years. Complain about it to those who have some control over it, not the store workers.
Let corporate know how you feel.
But above all, keep the real meaning of Christmas alive in spite of the commercial barrage.
I really believe that part of the devil’s work is to water down stuff that is holy. The more he can water down Christmas, the more he can begin to make us dread it, the more he can remove the emphasis of Jesus from it.
Refuse to be moved from the whole point of Christmas. It is not buying things, it is the incarnation of the Word of God made manifest in the flesh. All the rest is periphery.
Christmas is not for children. It is to remember.
And what a shame that such a beautiful time has been almost ruined by the commercial world.
No answers here. I am not sure if there are any. But it makes me sad.
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